Saket Dandotia has a few ideas about getting your time back

A trip to Goa ought to offer some protection from project management. Saket Dandotia remembers it differently: he could not get into Trello to check a ticket. The irritation stayed with him. After years of running engineering teams, he was still confronting a familiar absurdity: the people, the conversation and the work occupied different pieces of software. An industry capable of building almost anything had made checking what was happening rather elaborate.

That small frustration became part of the origin of Onetab. It also offers a useful entrance to Dandotia’s career. The Linkites co-founder has moved from building software for clients to helping computers understand video, then to putting development workflows together. Across those changes, there is a recurring commercial question: how much human effort disappears between wanting something done and getting the result?

A few comics, then a different sort of circulation

Dandotia comes from Shivpuri in Madhya Pradesh, where he completed his schooling. Before software became his business, he rented out comics to earn money. It is an appealingly tangible first enterprise: a story someone wants, a copy someone owns, and an arrangement that lets the two meet. The stock was paper rather than code; the exchange was perfectly intelligible.

His intended route through the Indian Institutes of Technology did not work out. He went to Indore instead, studying engineering at Medi-Caps Institute of Technology and Management in the 2005-09 cohort. His discipline was electronics and instrumentation. The detail matters because his professional history is often compressed into company names and funding rounds. Before the executive titles came an engineering education in a city that would remain central to his working life.

He subsequently worked at a software firm before starting his own venture. Linkites was founded in 2012. The company began with six employees and expanded to 150 within three years. Such numbers mark a change in the founder’s job as much as the company’s size. Work that six people can settle in conversation eventually needs managers, routines and a reliable way to know what everyone has promised.

Indore was the workshop

Linkites gave Dandotia a business in mobile and web software, with overseas clients and the practical demands of delivering for them. Its present operations span India, the United States and Singapore. The company describes its work in terms of AI, product engineering and lasting customer relationships. Behind those categories sits the less photogenic business of understanding requirements, making technical choices and seeing a project through.

That background helps explain why his later companies concern themselves with awkward processes. A services business encounters the distance between a customer’s wish and a working system every day. Dandotia’s subsequent products can be read as attempts to shorten particular stretches of that distance. It is an interpretation of the sequence, but a fairly economical one: the founder kept changing the task while retaining an interest in the work surrounding it.

He continued studying after becoming a founder. His executive education includes programmes in customer behaviour and marketing strategy at IIM Indore, Stanford’s Seed Spark programme, and leadership and change management at IIM Indore in 2021-22. These were executive programmes and certificates. In 2024, Medi-Caps awarded him its Distinguished Alumnus recognition. The student who had studied engineering in Indore became part of his institution’s public record of company builders.

Before the algorithm, forty videos by hand

The next venture grew out of work rather than a detached flash of inspiration. In 2014, Dandotia and Alok Patil were exploring machine learning and object detection for American clients. They began looking for a field where those capabilities could become a product. Video offered a conspicuous opportunity: it contained products, people and places that a viewer might recognise but a computer still needed help identifying.

Toch, started in 2016, initially explored making videos shoppable. A viewer could discover an item in a clip and follow the relevant information towards an ecommerce site. Dandotia and Patil tested the appetite with more than forty manually tagged videos before committing further to automation. The machine’s prospective career began with people doing the tagging themselves. Even artificial intelligence occasionally benefits from an apprenticeship in ordinary labour.

The experiment is revealing because it put the customer response ahead of the technical spectacle. Their early question was whether viewers wanted the experience. Automation would make it repeatable. Vinayak Shrivastav joined the founding group, bringing a different professional background to the partnership. By June 2018, a Hong Kong venture was also presenting Toch’s shoppable-video technology to Chinese-language markets, with Dandotia serving as its chief technology officer.

The goal had to become a clip

Toch’s later identity, VideoVerse, is associated with a different moment in the life of a video: finding the useful part and getting it to an audience. Its Magnifi product provided automated highlights for sports, entertainment and news. A long recording could become shorter material suited to social distribution. For a broadcaster or sports organisation, the appeal lay in publishing while the moment still had an audience waiting for it.

The company raised $11.75 million in Series A funding in October 2021. In April 2022, VideoVerse announced a $46.8 million Series B led by A91 Partners, Alpha Wave Global and existing investor Binny Bansal. Those were company financing rounds, with money intended for teams, technology, products and expansion. The amounts describe the resources behind the business; they do not measure Dandotia’s personal wealth.

His contribution included the organisational machinery. Shrivastav described him as an “operator at heart,” pointing to his management of cross-functional teams. It is a useful character sketch from a colleague. The product may be a system for selecting highlights, but the company requires people with different specialties to arrive at compatible decisions. Dandotia’s part in that work is less easily illustrated than a goal appearing on a phone, and rather harder to omit.

“An operator at heart.”

Vinayak Shrivastav on working with Saket Dandotia, 2022

A new company, with familiar collaborators

In 2023, Dandotia and Patil announced their departure from VideoVerse and their next venture, Onetab. Sonal Dandotia joined the founding team with experience in operations and finance. The combination placed commercial management alongside engineering. It also continued a working relationship between Saket and Patil that had already crossed from client software into video technology.

Onetab’s initial promise was unusually literal: bring the tools into one tab. Communication, task management, API testing and deployment belonged to the same development process, even when the software industry sold them separately. A developer could be making progress in one application while the account of that progress waited patiently in another. There is a certain bureaucratic elegance to asking someone to stop working so they can document that they are working.

In February 2025, Onetab announced $3.3 million in seed funding, with LIT Fund and Orbit co-leading the round. The planned investment centred on OneAsk, an AI agent intended to assist across software development. Coding, debugging, testing and deployment analysis were parts of the proposed workflow. Dandotia’s accompanying company post also set out an intention to improve the product through user feedback and take it into more markets.

The community needs a room, too

His attention has extended beyond the software interface. By June 2024, Onetab had introduced OneBharat, a series of developer gatherings in India intended for networking, sharing ideas and collaboration. The initiative gives a physical expression to an otherwise digital business. People who might share a platform can also benefit from sharing a room, particularly when they are trying to decide what to build.

There is a more theatrical side to his public language as well. Asked about his ambitions for generative AI in 2024, he reached for Shah Rukh Khan as the comparison, invoking charm and humour alongside technical ambition. It is a livelier aspiration than another declaration about market share. His advice to younger founders was more prosaic: understand the problem, build a complementary team, listen to customers and learn from setbacks. Apparently the supporting cast still matters.

What counts as a useful hour?

By July 2026, Dandotia was discussing Onetab in terms of agents that move development tasks forward, alongside people making architectural and design decisions. His stated test for usefulness had become quite specific: deployment lead time, failed changes and rework. Generating more code is an incomplete answer if someone must later spend the afternoon repairing it. A busy machine can be every bit as inconsiderate as a busy colleague.

Onetab’s current presentation places agents in team channels, with visible actions and permissions. That direction brings the story back to coordination: people should be able to understand what happened and retain authority over consequential steps. The sophistication of the underlying software only becomes useful when the team can work with it.

From rented comics to client projects, tagged videos and development agents, Dandotia’s career has accumulated several kinds of business. Indore, long-running collaborators and the practical business of organising work recur throughout it. The Goa ticket supplies a suitably modest ending to the grander ambitions. A founder who once helped software companies deliver their promises now wants the software itself to be a more agreeable colleague. Getting a clear answer about a ticket would be a respectable place to start.