Sourabh Deorah and the small business of feeling valued

A benefits card is an unpromising object around which to arrange a life. It promises a cheaper dinner, perhaps a better deal on a purchase. Most people accept the saving and move on. Sourabh Deorah and Smiti Bhatt Deorah investigated who was providing it. While working at Microsoft in the United States, they discovered that an outside business ran the employee perks programme. Inside a familiar convenience, they saw a business worth understanding.

That curiosity helped bring them back to India. The company they built, now AdvantageClub.ai, would move from corporate discounts towards employee recognition, rewards and communities. Eventually, it would offer an AI assistant to help people perform some of those tasks through conversation. The distance between a discount and an AI assistant sounds considerable. Follow Deorah’s career, though, and the route becomes easier to see: he keeps working on the details that make an offer useful to another person.

There is something pleasingly practical about this origin. A workplace can announce that it values its people in very expensive language. A benefit has to survive contact with somebody’s actual shopping basket.

Before the benefits card, there was Fundoori

Deorah comes from Dibrugarh in Assam. His interest in enterprise began well before a venture investor entered the picture. He grew up around a family business, helped his father with parts of it and started coding at twelve. His father later encouraged him to concentrate on his studies. Business, however, had already found its way onto the syllabus.

At Thapar University in Patiala, Deorah built Fundoori, a hyperlocal deals and social platform aimed mainly at fellow students. It made money, by his account, but closed when he left India for further study. A student business can end for the wonderfully literal reason that the student leaves. The interest behind it travelled with him.

He studied computer science at UCLA from 2010 to 2012, concentrating on data mining and machine learning. His academic work included co-authored research on advising students about their choice of major, and on evaluating and extending the Duckworth-Lewis method in cricket. The subjects were different; both involved bringing computational methods to decisions people cared about.

There were hackathons and startup events in Los Angeles, too. Later came engineering work at Amazon and Microsoft. At Amazon in Cupertino, he helped build the first version of platform search for Amazon devices. These were opportunities to learn how software behaves when the intended audience extends well beyond a college campus.

A perk acquires a social life

At Microsoft, the founders had experienced benefits as users before considering them as builders. They liked the convenience. They also saw room to improve the technology behind the programme. Their training offered a way into the problem: data and personalisation could help make employee offers more relevant.

The business they developed in India connected employers and brands. That required persuading different groups to participate in the same system, a familiar marketplace difficulty with an especially administrative wardrobe. An employer needs worthwhile options for staff. A participating brand wants people who will actually use the offer. The product has to give both a reason to return.

As Advantage Club developed, rewards gained a public dimension. Employees could recognise colleagues, while others could respond to that recognition. Points could be redeemed against different choices. The exchange carried something beyond purchasing power: somebody’s contribution had been noticed, and other people could see it.

By 2019, Deorah was talking about hobby clubs and the space between merely sharing an employer and becoming friends. He described colleagues as “more than strangers, less than friends”. It is a compact description of office life. You may trust someone with a client presentation while knowing absolutely nothing about their weekends.

Chess, shared interests and communities gave the platform another role. A common employer supplied the starting connection; an activity could give colleagues a reason to talk. Deorah’s product thinking had widened from what an employee could receive to what employees might do together.

“More than strangers, less than friends.”

Sourabh Deorah, on colleagues and trust, 2019

He has also explained the commercial arrangement plainly: employers pay a subscription, and brands pay a small amount when rewards are redeemed. In his account, the aim is to charge less than the value delivered and build through scale. That makes the usefulness of a transaction central to the business.

Two founders, room for disagreement

Smiti is part of this story from the benefits card onwards. A fellow UCLA computer science graduate and former Microsoft engineer, she became AdvantageClub.ai’s co-founder and chief operating officer. Her responsibilities include business development, marketing and customer relationships. Sourabh’s remit includes strategic direction and product development.

In his writing about founding teams, Deorah has described the advantage of dividing work according to strengths. At Advantage Club, one founder concentrated on marketing and sales while the other handled technology and product. As a company grows, he argues, founders also become communicators, repeatedly explaining its values and goals to people joining later.

The idea has a domestic complication: Sourabh and Smiti are life partners as well as business partners. In a public conversation about their working relationship, they discussed defined domains, respect and the ability to argue over ideas. A company does provide an unusually extensive supply of subjects on which a couple might disagree.

Their company’s published culture includes a commitment to discuss, disagree and then commit to a decision. Read alongside their account of partnership, that is a practical operating rule. Debate needs space; execution needs a point at which everyone knows what has been decided. Keeping those moments clear is work of its own.

The boulder starts rolling back

Advantage Club joined Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 batch. Deorah later shared an image of product-market fit that had stayed with him from the programme: before it arrives, you push a boulder uphill; afterwards, the boulder rolls downhill and you run to keep ahead of it. Success, in this version, changes the direction of the exertion. It does very little for your leisure time.

His published advice to founders is more restrained than the usual celebration of speed. During the funding downturn, he urged attention to profitability, careful spending and customers likely to convert. He recommended testing ideas on a small scale before expanding them, and measuring things that help a business make decisions. A flattering dashboard can be an expensive ornament.

In December 2024, AdvantageClub.ai announced a $4 million funding round led by Axilor Ventures. The stated plans included international expansion and further work on AI. For Deorah, the American market was part of a return journey: a workplace experience encountered there had helped inspire a venture built from India, now pursuing employers across borders.

That expansion also makes the original problem more demanding. A reward catalogue has to work across different markets. Employers want a programme they can manage; employees want choices that make sense where they live. Growing the company means repeating that negotiation in many settings.

Teaching the software to say thank you

The AdvantageClub.ai name made Deorah’s technical interests more visible. Announcing the rebrand in 2024, he said the company had been using AI since 2018. He also introduced Adva, its AI engagement assistant. For someone trained in machine learning and data mining, the technology was an extension of a longstanding interest.

The 2025 announcement of ADVA 2.0 described a conversational route to actions such as awarding colleagues or redeeming points. Instead of navigating a series of screens, a user could ask the assistant to carry out a task. The ambition was to shorten the distance between deciding to recognise someone and completing the recognition.

In May 2025, Deorah discussed the importance of local rewards and cultural relevance. The company offered options across more than 100 countries, he said, with an emphasis on choices suited to different regions. The task combines software with the stubborn specificity of what people want. A global programme still reaches its destination one preference at a time.

In March 2026, he reported that AdvantageClub.ai had crossed ₹1,100 crore in redemptions for FY2026. Alongside the announcement, he advertised roles in India and Manila. The figure describes rewards being redeemed through the platform. Its human-scale counterpart is the moment someone finds a use for the points they have received.

The job he would choose anyway

On his Wellfound profile, Deorah was asked what he would be doing if money were no issue. His answer: “What I am doing right now”. It is an economical response from somebody whose business has given considerable thought to rewards.

The answer fits the continuity in his career. Fundoori concerned offers people might use. His engineering work concerned software people could navigate. AdvantageClub.ai brings those interests into the workplace, where recognition has to pass through a budget, a product and somebody’s ordinary working day.

There is still a person at the end of that chain. Someone receiving thanks, choosing a reward or finding a colleague who shares an interest. Deorah’s career has grown around those modest encounters. The benefits card was a small object. It turned out to contain quite a lot of work.