Before Priyanka Rungta asked businesses to talk to their data, she helped a city speak with its hands. Her film, Let Calcutta Surprise You, promotes Kolkata through hand shadows. No digital effects. For a software founder, it is an appealing choice: put the machinery out of sight and let people enjoy what it makes possible.
The film appeared in 2011. Rungta was credited as producer, Navsoft beside her name. The client was the Calcutta chapter of YPO; the creative credits included 100 Watts Design Studio, Kritika Malhotra and Arko Sen. It was a collaboration with an unusually economical vocabulary. A city, with all its complications, had to fit into a few minutes.
That small creative detour opens a useful window onto a much longer working life. Rungta founded Navsoft in 1999, aged 24. She went on to develop e-commerce software through BoostMySale and establish NavAI. Across those ventures, the recurring challenge has been making something unfamiliar usable enough that another person will give it a chance.
A city in three minutes and twenty seconds
Berlin's interfilm festival included Let Calcutta Surprise You in its 2012 Viral Video Award programme. The archive records a 2011 Indian experimental film, running three minutes and twenty seconds, under Rungta's name. It is an unexpected entry in a career usually described through products and software teams. A festival catalogue has room for a rather different kind of deliverable.
The film's own description makes its method explicit: hand shadows, without digital effects, moving through the city's sights and sounds. The restraint matters. Promoting a place invites the temptation to show everything. Here, the work depends on what an audience can recognize from a silhouette. The pleasure is in the transformation, and in being allowed to complete the picture yourself.
Its reach also escaped the usual corporate circuit. In 2016, Kolkata-born scientist and aerial filmmaker Sandip De singled it out among videos of the city he liked. Years after its release, it was still part of somebody else's conversation about how to look at Kolkata. A promotional commission had acquired a life beyond the meeting that commissioned it.
Rungta has since recalled the emotional responses it drew from Bengalis living away from home. She has also written about leaving Kolkata for Mumbai and retaining the hope of returning. The attachment gives the film a personal dimension. There is affection behind the invitation, and an audience for whom recognizing a city can mean recognizing a part of themselves.
A city told through hand shadows.
2011 film · interfilm Berlin programme, 2012
First, persuade someone to want the web
Navsoft's early difficulties were less graceful. The business began when prospective customers still needed convincing that web applications deserved their attention. Rungta remembers finding developers as a problem too. “It was very problematic to find talented developers,” she said in 2015. Before the team could sell the work, it had to find people able to do it.
Then there was the connection itself. Her account of unreliable internet service included having someone at the provider's office to help keep the line working. It is an almost absurdly physical detail in a business devoted to remote possibilities. Somewhere behind the promise of the internet was a person waiting for it to come back.
Customer resistance helped send Navsoft toward the United States and United Kingdom. Demand abroad offered a route forward. Rungta also described financing the business through its earnings rather than outside investment at that point. The early story is full of such practical accommodations: find the customer, find the developer, keep the line alive, earn enough to continue.
Looking back from today's AI work, that beginning makes the distance travelled visible. In 1999, the question was whether a business needed a web application. Today, her work includes helping businesses ask questions of information already inside their systems. Both require explaining the usefulness of a new tool to someone who has other things to do.
“It was very problematic to find talented developers.”
Priyanka Rungta, 2015
Another chapter, with a shopping basket
In 2009, Rungta stepped back from Navsoft to look after her children. Entrepreneurship remained an interest, and e-commerce supplied the next opening. BoostMySale brought her into the business of helping merchants run online stores. By June 2015, its early customers included The Bombay Store, Yash Raj Films and Borosil Glassworks.
The problem extended well beyond putting a storefront on a screen. Sellers needed listings, inventory, orders and marketing to work together across different channels. A platform could be attractive in a demonstration and still leave a merchant with a tiresome working day. BoostMySale's proposition joined those functions, including marketplace connections and payment options relevant to Indian retailers.
Retail also supplied complications that no polished product tour could wish away. Short-lived offers could change inventory quickly. Catalogues needed attention. Merchants required training and, sometimes, substantial customization. Rungta described those moving parts as part of the excitement of developing the product. The software had to keep pace with people selling actual things to actual customers.
The business eventually sat within Nettsetgo Software, a sister concern of Navsoft established in 2015. Its description of the service includes consulting and operational support alongside technology. That combination is revealing: a merchant buying help with e-commerce may need someone to help run it, long after the online shop first opens.
The people behind the product
Navsoft describes Rungta's responsibilities as innovation and product development, with hiring and developing talent part of her contribution to its growth. The work has a human dependency as plain as the early shortage of developers. A product needs people who can build it, understand its users and keep working on the unglamorous parts.
She works alongside fellow founding director Abhishake Rungta, whose responsibilities include finance, marketing and planning, and Sandeep Palod, president of operations and strategy. Their different remits give a more useful picture of the company than a solitary-founder portrait would. Product decisions have consequences for delivery, staffing and the money available to do the next thing.
Rungta's education includes MIT's Mastering Design Thinking programme. Her public professional biography also describes volunteering around education, the environment and disadvantaged communities. These are interests beyond the product catalogue, without requiring the invention of a private routine or a grand personal philosophy. The visible commitments are specific enough to stand on their own.
Give the question somewhere to go
With NavAI, the interface becomes a conversation. Rungta has invited people to ask business questions in ordinary English and receive answers the same way. The appeal is easy to understand. Having information inside a company does not automatically put a useful answer within reach of the employee who needs one.
A 2024 webcast announcement placed her at the centre of that explanation. Its agenda covered pricing, matching products and customers, discounts, upselling and identifying prospective buyers. These are recognizable commercial decisions. Putting them on the agenda gives the AI discussion a destination: somebody has to decide what to sell, to whom, and on what terms.
NavAI describes its purpose as making business intelligence available to more people, drawing on Navsoft's years of work with enterprise data. Its founder's note begins with the frustration of waiting too long for a simple answer. That is a useful measure of ambition. The company wants the employee with a question to spend less time navigating the organization of information.
The same explanation can be tested in front of customers. At the 2026 Future of Manufacturing Summit in Mumbai, Rungta and Borosil's Dhruv Suri presented a session on AI in manufacturing. Navsoft also received the event's Excellence in AI Innovation for Manufacturing award. The stage brought the product builder and a business technology leader into the same discussion.
A founder who asks people to try unfamiliar software also has to take their reluctance seriously. The early customer who cannot see the point and the merchant who needs training belong in the same history as the launch. Those encounters give the work its proportions. Each product brings an explanation, and each explanation meets a person entitled to ask whether it will help.
The dignity of making things understandable
Rungta's account of attending Startup India's launch in 2016 included a simple injunction: “Begin by building a culture of respect and dignity.” It is a useful sentence to keep beside the product history. Growing a software business involves many people being asked to learn something, explain something or admit that something has stopped working.
There is a pleasing range to the things she has helped make: a web application business, software for merchants, a film about a city, AI tools for business questions. Their audiences have different needs. A viewer wants to feel the place. A retailer wants the order handled. An employee wants an answer before the next decision arrives.
The film remains the most surprising place to begin because its ambition is so legible. A few hands, a changing shadow, a city becoming recognizable. You do not need to understand the technique to follow the invitation. Across Rungta's software career, making the invitation equally clear has been a rather longer assignment.