The trouble began with half a litre of milk. A customer would send a grocery list over WhatsApp to the Nathani family shop in Raipur. The shop might have one litre, perhaps in another brand. Now an employee had to call, negotiate the substitution, revise the order and return to the list. One missing item could turn an apparently modern transaction into a tiny radio play. Multiply it across a day, and convenience had quietly hired a bureaucracy.
Sonakshi Nathani saw the wasted motion. She also saw why the obvious software answers were wrong. For many small Indian merchants and their customers, the useful internet was not a polished ecommerce stack. It was WhatsApp and YouTube. Asking a shopkeeper to master a complicated storefront was rather like solving a wobbly table by selling the owner a new dining room.
Nathani had the technical vocabulary to describe the problem. She studied computer science at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, then spent more than three years as a software developer at Microsoft. Yet the important education was happening at home, in the gap between how software imagined commerce and how her family actually conducted it.
A shop counter makes a fine laboratory
In 2019, Nathani and her IIIT Hyderabad classmate Ashutosh Singla built Bikayi around that gap. The idea was straightforward: give small businesses a simple digital catalogue and ordering system that could live comfortably beside WhatsApp. The first version was free. Customers used it, valued the new features, and supplied a useful verdict that no compliment can match - they were willing to pay. Roughly two months after launch, the company introduced monthly and annual subscriptions.
It was not the pair's first experiment. They had looked at restaurant QR codes and education technology before the family shop supplied a problem with a pulse. That sequence matters. The mythology of startups prefers lightning. Actual product discovery more often resembles looking for one's spectacles while wearing them.
The company found its moment. Bikayi entered Y Combinator's Summer 2020 batch and raised a $2 million seed round. During a period when neighborhood businesses were urgently moving online, it offered a practical bridge rather than a sermon about digital transformation. By September 2021, the business said it had more than four million registered users. A $10.8 million Series A followed, led by Sequoia Capital India, with existing investors including Y Combinator and Pioneer Fund participating.
Funding stories usually end at the photograph: founders smiling, a round number in the headline, the future behaving itself. Nathani's more revealing story begins just after that photograph. The original sales-led model for small merchants proved difficult to sustain. The company had built reach, hired rapidly and acquired the sort of history that makes changing direction emotionally expensive. But reach is not the same thing as a durable business, and history is a poor product manager.
The company after the company
Bikayi moved upmarket. It became BIK, aimed at ecommerce and retail brands, and traded the promise of a quick storefront for a broader system of customer acquisition, support and retention. WhatsApp remained important, but it became one channel among email, text, Instagram, Messenger and the web. The underlying question shifted from “How does a small shop get online?” to “How does a brand keep a useful conversation going everywhere?”
A second product, Manifest AI, brought an AI shopping assistant onto ecommerce websites. BIK now describes itself as an agentic AI CRM: a place where brands can deploy ready-made commerce agents or build their own, giving each one a goal, instructions and a definition of success. The current product catalogue ranges from order management and helpdesk automation to customer data, gamification and analytics. The nouns are new. The concern with awkward customer journeys is not.
By May 2024, Nathani wrote that the rebuilt business had reached $1.5 million in annual recurring revenue after about 18 months. It was a smaller number than the grandest startup stories enjoy printing, and a more interesting one. It represented customers paying for the new thesis. The company today says more than 500 global brands use its products and presents a marketplace of over 100 commerce agents. Those are company figures, useful as a snapshot of ambition and scale rather than marble tablets from the mountain.
A pivot can sound elegantly geometric from a distance. From inside, it involves telling employees, customers and investors that the confident map has acquired a large blank region. Nathani speaks about the period in the language of adaptation: premium pricing, larger contracts, conflict, rejection and the practical value of a co-founder. She has also described the skepticism that accompanied the move, including the belief that a company built in India could not serve American businesses. Her answer was to build in both places.
The founder's daily negotiation
Nathani's public advice is strikingly psychological. Entrepreneurship, in her description, requires fooling one's own mind every day because every day brings another challenge. This is not the invulnerable founder of conference lore. It is a person negotiating with doubt before breakfast, then opening the customer spreadsheet.
Her other recurring source of confidence is biography. Hearing the stories of successful founders once made her think, “If a normal person like him can do it, then why can't I?” The sentence is charming because it quietly removes the pedestal. Founders become useful examples only after they become human-sized.
That matters in Nathani's own path. She came from a business family in Raipur and has credited her grandfather's entrepreneurial example. She entered IIIT Hyderabad without prior ease around computers, then secured a Microsoft role during campus placements. The conventional route was working. Leaving it meant trading a known race for a puzzle whose first two proposed answers failed. Her later career has not been a single leap of faith so much as a succession of revised bets.
The revisions did not make her less ambitious. They made the ambition more specific. Early Bikayi wanted to help every small business win online. BIK seeks to consolidate the scattered technology used by ecommerce brands. Manifest AI tries to turn a website visit into a guided shopping conversation. Each formulation is narrower in method and larger in geography.
Building the room that was missing
There is another project in Nathani's portfolio, one that does not fit neatly into a software dashboard. She founded Roaring Ladies of Ecommerce after noticing a personal absence: as a woman leading a company, there were subjects she did not feel she could discuss candidly with the people around her. Her response was characteristically operational. If the room did not exist, assemble it.
Within ten months, she said the community had grown beyond 700 ecommerce executives. Its sessions have included candid conversations with leaders from brands and retail publications, practical workshops and a “Clash of PDP” series focused on product pages. The tone is less ceremonial empowerment and more useful professional exchange. Members compare experiments, share openings and discuss what is actually happening in their work.
The community reveals a thread that is easy to miss if one only follows the product names. Nathani repeatedly notices systems in which people are already improvising: shopkeepers maintaining inventory through message threads, marketers stitching together fragmented tools, women leaders searching for peers with whom they can speak plainly. She does not begin with a category. She begins with the improvisation and asks why it is necessary.
Now based in New York, she works across a company with roots in India and customers in several markets. Bik.ai and Manifest AI continue to hire and release products across marketing and support. Roaring Ladies of Ecommerce has begun convening in person in New York. The scene is a long way from the family grocery counter, though perhaps not as far as it looks. Both are places where people meet, ask for something and hope the system understands.
The temptation in telling Nathani's story is to make the pivot the moral. Change when the evidence changes. Sensible enough, but incomplete. Plenty of companies change direction. The distinctive act is deciding what travels with you. Nathani left behind the original customer segment and storefront product. She kept the habit of watching ordinary behavior closely, the respect for the customer's language and the willingness to charge only after value became visible.
The result is not one immaculate founder story. It is two beginnings connected by the same question: where is commerce making people do unnecessary work? In Raipur, the answer arrived as a WhatsApp list and the wrong quantity of milk. In New York, it arrives as an ecommerce stack with too many tabs. Software changes quickly. Irritation, fortunately for entrepreneurs, has excellent retention.