In March 2010, following the Indian Premier League on your phone could begin with a call. You dialled a number, received an SMS and opened the link. July Systems supplied the mobile platform. Prem Bhatia, its president, compared the experience to snacking: short bursts of cricket, available without sitting down for the whole match.
There was a catch. Updates arrived with a one-ball delay, and the mobile internet still cost whatever your operator charged. The service belonged to the world its customers actually inhabited. A phone, a familiar action, a little patience. Cricket enthusiasm did the rest.
Sixteen years later, Bhatia leads Graas, a Singapore company building AI for retail commerce. The vocabulary has acquired knowledge graphs and autonomous agents. His working life has also included Sachin Tendulkar, airline advertising and Manila’s railway stations. A missed call is a useful place to start making sense of the itinerary.
Hollywood settles a family argument
Bhatia grew up around marketing. His father spent his career at Unilever; his mother worked at an agency. He graduated from Durham University in 1996, worked in advertising at Lowe and moved into sports marketing. The family had a perfectly serviceable model for a respectable career. He proceeded to complicate it.
As Bhatia tells it, his father initially found sports marketing embarrassing. Then Jerry Maguire came out, and the profession suddenly had a glamorous explanation. Hollywood had performed a small but useful piece of domestic public relations. Years later, discussing his career, Bhatia still reached readily for films.
In the late 1990s, his work at WorldTel brought him into the commercial world of Tendulkar and Sourav Ganguly. Athlete management, broadcast rights and sponsorship put him close to the machinery that turns sporting affection into business. A cricketer might be adored by millions; making that audience valuable required contracts, distribution and advertisers.
There was cricket in his own background, too. He played in Durham’s first XI in the mid-1990s. His later account places him alongside Andrew Strauss and Jeremy Snape. The game was both something he knew from the field and something he would learn to package for a much larger audience.
In 2001, he joined Marcus Wight and Keith Impey in the management buyout of Sportsworld. Its subsequent sale to Havas Worldwide came in 2008. The sports chapter gave him commercial experience beyond representing a famous name: ownership, partnerships and the eventual sale of a business.
Cricket leaves the television
July Systems put Bhatia in a different part of the sports business. By 2010, he was its president, working in mobile publishing as sports audiences began carrying another screen. The company’s work reached major rights holders and publishers, including the PGA Tour, ESPN, the NFL and the IPL.
Contemporary reporting described a Bangalore research and development team of 60 behind the IPL mobile platform. The technology was a team undertaking, with founder and CEO Rajesh Reddy explaining the system. Bhatia supplied the comparison with a snack. Between them sat the essential product question: how much cricket could a person conveniently consume on a phone?
The answer had to accommodate the network and the device. Fans could use an SMS link or go straight to the mobile website. The experience offered a small, immediate connection to a match, with its limitations visible. A one-ball delay sounds intolerable until the alternative is knowing nothing until you get home.
Looking back, Bhatia puts the lesson plainly: “So the interface was the missed call.” The line is memorable because it locates the design decision in a habit people already understood. Plenty of technology businesses would like their users to become a little more like engineers. Here, the engineers had to become a little more like cricket fans.
“So the interface was the missed call.”
Prem Bhatia, recalling the IPL mobile service
The audience waiting for a train
Bhatia co-founded PHAR Partnerships, whose work took the commercial ideas of sponsorship into transport and infrastructure. Wight, his fellow founder, explained the opportunity in 2017: airports and other transport places gathered large audiences for long stretches of time. The sponsorship expertise familiar in sport could find work there, too.
As PHAR’s managing director for Asia, Bhatia oversaw a business spanning Southeast Asian markets. The company worked with airlines, airports and urban rail. Its name came from the racehorse Phar Lap, an agreeable reminder that corporate naming can occasionally survive without a workshop about brand values.
In Manila, PHAR partnered with Light Rail Manila Corporation on advertising in LRT-1. Bhatia described bringing outdoor advertising together with mobile and retail, pointing to 200 digital screens across the line. A station could offer several connected ways to reach a commuter rather than a single poster glimpsed on the way to work.
The station partnership programme had another practical purpose. Revenue was intended to support upgrades to the EDSA station, including roofing, flooring, electrical systems and passenger conveniences. Advertising was being attached to the physical upkeep of a place people used every day. That made the commercial question rather more tangible than a click.
Meanwhile, PHAR Focus, launched with AirAsia in 2016, approached the audience through travel data. The platform used segments relating to travel behaviour, purchase intent and other indicators to support targeted campaigns. At the 2017 Media Congress, Bhatia discussed how transit media was changing and why measurement and attribution would matter more.
A sale with too many moving parts
By 2022, Bhatia and fellow entrepreneur Ashwin Puri had founded Graas. Its name shortened Growth-as-a-Service, giving the company a commercial objective before anyone opened a dashboard. The launch brought together two acquisitions: Shoptimize, with direct-to-consumer and data expertise, and SELLinALL, with marketplace experience.
The choice gave Graas existing teams, technology and customers. Bhatia had already been an investor and adviser to startups, often in consumer-facing or advertising businesses where he and his co-founder believed they could contribute. Graas concentrated that experience on the merchant’s side of online commerce.
His description of the problem is specific. Brands need visibility across search, social platforms and marketplaces. Advertising costs and marketplace commissions squeeze margins; inventory, warehousing and delivery add further complications. Selling more can create more work and expense. The merchant needs to understand the whole transaction, including the costs that arrived before and after it.
Graas proposed joining the information from those separate systems. In a September 2022 interview, Bhatia described a unified data pool feeding an AI engine, with recommendations that could be executed across storefronts, marketing and operations. He presented it as a way to give brands access to capabilities that would be costly to build internally.
In Delhi that September, he spoke about connecting the region from Mumbai to Manila through data. The geography reflected his own working history across India and Southeast Asia. The problem travelled well: merchants selling through different platforms still needed a coherent account of what was happening to their businesses.
His writing in 2023 pressed a further question: what action should a brand take next? He used footwear inventory to show the difficulty. Style, colour, size, seasonal demand and geography all affect what a company should hold. A chart showing yesterday’s sales leaves the next purchase order unresolved.
The handwriting on the order
By April 2024, Bhatia’s examples had become more operational. An apparel brand could compare campaigns across channels, examine stock and sales trends, and decide whether to adjust an advertising budget or pricing. He wanted analysis to explain the reason behind a change in revenue, as well as record the change itself.
The next stage was Agent Foundry. In August 2025, Graas announced US$9 million in pre-Series B funding led by Tin Men Capital to support its development and launch in India. The company was extending its work from insights and recommendations into AI agents that could carry out commerce tasks.
One example described in December 2025 involved handwritten lists from grocers being turned into structured digital orders. The workflow used optical character recognition and language models. It began with the customer’s existing paperwork and gave that paperwork a route into the software. There is something reassuringly unceremonious about the idea: bring your scribble.
Bhatia also described the need to accommodate retail demand surges. The company said its AWS infrastructure supported spikes of up to 20 times normal demand and that it had tripled its customer base without increasing infrastructure costs. Those are company-reported operating figures, describing a particular period rather than a promise to every customer.
Buying the missing context
On August 12, 2026, Graas announced a US$17 million Series B led by LemmaTree and the acquisition of Trustana, a product-data platform. The purchase added capabilities for organizing and enriching product information. Graas described bringing that information into the commerce knowledge graph used by its agents.
Series B led by LemmaTree, announced alongside the acquisition of Trustana.
The announcement matters to Bhatia’s story because the acquisition method returns. At launch, Graas combined marketplace and direct-to-consumer expertise. Four years later, it bought another piece of the commerce problem. Product information, customer history and inventory were to live in a common structure, giving agents more context for recommendations and orders.
His career gives that ambition a longer perspective. Representing an athlete meant understanding the value of an audience. Mobile publishing meant reaching that audience on the device available. Transport marketing put him among people already waiting, travelling and shopping. Retail AI asks him to connect the information around a purchase closely enough to help the next one happen.
The missed call remains a useful detail. It carries none of the ceremony of a funding announcement, and nobody needs a glossary to understand it. A person wanted cricket. A company made the route shorter. Bhatia’s next chapter will be judged in equally ordinary moments: an order placed, an item available, a merchant making a decision before the opportunity passes.