Tanmaya Jain and the business of being heard

A sales presentation usually ends when the person buying has heard enough. Tanmaya Jain remembers one stopping for a more encouraging reason. He was pitching inFeedo to Ankur Warikoo, then leading the business that became Nearbuy, when Warikoo interrupted: “I need this product more than you need the sale.” After a long stretch of trying to persuade people that employee feedback deserved its own software, the buyer had supplied the argument himself.

Groupon India became inFeedo’s first paying customer in April 2015. The company had begun as a college project in 2013, so this was hardly an overnight conversion. Two years is a substantial apprenticeship when you start at eighteen. Jain was learning how to build something people would buy while still completing the education for which he had originally enrolled.

The scene contains the question that keeps returning in his career: who gets to speak, and who takes the trouble to hear them? His business would eventually put an AI chatbot between employees and their organisations. But the early breakthrough was wonderfully low-tech. Someone listened to a young founder, recognised a problem, and agreed to pay for a solution.

A campus, a roommate, a stubborn idea

Jain studied computer science at Shiv Nadar University, graduating in 2016. His cofounder, Varun Puri, was his college roommate. Long before institutional investors entered the picture, the partnership had that ordinary student geography: two people sharing space, comparing frustrations, and finding a project large enough to consume their attention.

The university experience gave Jain a particular grievance. He had come from a school environment he considered liberal, and found the hierarchy of college jarring. Ideas could disappear before anybody properly considered them. An institution could contain plenty of clever people and still make it difficult for their observations to reach someone with the authority to act.

He began to see the same pattern inside companies. That observation gave inFeedo its initial purpose: help organisations collect ideas and feedback from their own people. A crowded suggestion box has little value if everything inside remains untouched. Jain’s interest was in getting a useful thought through the machinery.

He also had a considerable advantage. His father, Palash Jain, had led Google India operations and helped open doors to HR leaders. Jain has described those introductions as central to his early research. Acknowledging that access makes the story more useful. He had people to call; the work was to learn what their answers meant.

Amber arrived after the awkward years

Access did not produce an automatic fit between product and market. By Jain’s account, the early company endured rejection, departing customers, investor refusals and the exit of a cofounder. Three years into the venture, he was considering closing it. The founder’s title had arrived considerably earlier than the founder’s certainty.

Then he encountered Jake Knapp’s book Sprint. The team used its approach to build and test a new proposition: Amber, an AI engagement bot. Jain recalls working, eating and sleeping at the office while the prototype took shape. When they showed it to HR leaders, five executives were ready to pay. That was a more useful kind of encouragement than applause.

Amber emerged in 2016. Its conversational format offered a different route into the problem the team had been circling. Employees could be asked about their experience directly; their answers could help HR teams identify concerns and decide whom to approach. The product put a recognisable conversational presence around work that could otherwise feel like another administrative exercise.

There is an uncomfortable lesson in that pivot for anybody fond of a neat origin story. Recognising a problem and finding a product are separate accomplishments. Jain had spent years on the first before the second began to work. Persistence mattered, but so did changing what he was asking customers to use.

The executive whose job was to listen

The title inFeedo gave Amber was Chief Listening Officer. It was a small joke with a serious premise. Companies appoint people to make decisions, allocate money and communicate policy. Listening can end up as something everyone approves of and nobody quite owns. Giving it an executive title made the omission visible.

Jain’s argument concerns the distance between a workforce and its leadership. In a small team, a founder may know what happened yesterday because everyone was in the same room. Add offices, managers and countries, and that knowledge becomes selective. The people with the most polished updates may acquire the most attention. Other experiences travel less well.

In his writing about quiet quitting in 2022, Jain urged employers to examine what employees were experiencing before attaching a fashionable label to their behaviour. He argued for regular, personalised conversations and quicker responses to feedback. The practical ambition was to give people teams context before a difficult conversation, rather than leave them guessing after an employee resigned.

The proposition still depends on what humans do next. A conversation can reveal a frustration; somebody must decide whether to address it. A dashboard cannot, by itself, repair a relationship with a manager. That tension makes the listening metaphor useful. Hearing an answer creates a responsibility, and the software is only part of fulfilling it.

“Customer-first so that they can be employee-first.”Tanmaya Jain, on inFeedo’s mission

9:07 a.m., and a different kind of audience

Jain remembers the time of the Y Combinator acceptance email: 9:07 a.m. in India, on April 28, 2020. The specificity suggests how much that message mattered. The startup had been pursuing international expansion and fundraising when its plans became uncertain. Admission to the Summer 2020 batch supplied a new point of reference.

There had already been a more theatrical introduction to investment. Jain and Puri appeared on The Vault, an Indian televised startup pitching programme, in 2016. Jain later described receiving better terms after the broadcast and closing a seed round. Television gave the business an audience; the subsequent work still involved finding customers and making the product useful.

Y Combinator placed inFeedo among another group of founders. By 2021, Jain and Puri had also appeared in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Asia list in Enterprise Technology. The recognition attached two names to a business that was increasingly known through a third: Amber.

In March 2022 came a $12 million Series A led by Jungle Ventures, with Tiger Global and existing investor Bling Capital participating. Jain linked those relationships to expansion in Southeast Asia and the United States. The geography had changed since the college room. His product still concerned the everyday experience of showing up for work.

A saxophone is a demanding colleague

Outside the company, Jain plays saxophone and piano. He taught himself using YouTube. It is a pleasing detail in the life of a software founder: the internet supplies the lesson, but the student still has to produce the sound. There is no persuasive slide deck that will make a badly played note more agreeable.

He has described stepping away during the working day, sometimes at lunch, to play a song before returning. In the photograph here, the instrument has his attention. There is no audience in the frame, no conference badge, no product demonstration. For once, the founder is visibly occupied with something that will not answer an email.

Jain draws a parallel between learning an instrument and starting a company. The first attempts can provoke impatience and the urge to stop; progress demands that you stay with something difficult. It is a comparison earned at the level of practice. Knowing what the finished piece should sound like offers no exemption from the scales.

Music also makes room for a different measure of accomplishment. A tune can be finished within a lunch break. A company’s mission is liable to expand as soon as it appears within reach. The saxophone offers a task with its own stubborn rules, and a result its player can hear immediately.

The return to the lecture hall

In November 2025, Jain announced a return to Shiv Nadar University for a TEDx talk titled Who Will I Become Next. He identified himself as Class of 2016 and recalled the mission he and Puri had written down on campus. The return brought the company’s public story back to its student beginnings.

His announcement was also impatient with the conventions of founder speeches. He wanted to speak honestly to the younger version of himself who might be sitting in the audience, still trying to work out a direction. That is a more interesting ambition than arriving as a finished example. A person asking who comes next leaves some space for revision.

By December 2025, his public account of the company’s progress included a full cycle of profitable, cash-flow-positive operations, an 82 percent gross margin and 6.5 years of runway. These were Jain’s reported figures. He framed the financial discipline as freedom to make choices, including the choice to decline opportunities.

That perspective connects to the early years, when a paying customer could matter more than an approving room. Cash generated by customers gives a founder time. Time makes it possible to work on a difficult product without treating every next conversation as a referendum on survival. It is an understated form of ambition.

A larger room, the same question

The company’s stated mission is to make 100 million employees feel heard and valued. It is an aspiration, rather than a description of a completed task. As inFeedo’s scope has widened into HR support and automation, that original promise provides a useful way to judge what belongs in the business.

For Jain, growth introduces the possibility of becoming the sort of leader whose blind spots originally bothered him. A founder can speak fluently about listening while gradually losing access to unvarnished answers. The larger the organisation, the more effort it takes to discover what the polite version of the meeting left out.

His career gives that problem a personal shape: the student frustrated by hierarchy, the founder whose first product needed rethinking, the musician starting again with an unfamiliar instrument. Each involves a gap between an intention and what actually happens. Progress begins when the gap becomes visible enough to work on.

There is something appealingly practical about building a business around that moment. Somebody says the thing that has been going unsaid. Somebody else hears it early enough to respond. Jain has spent much of his working life trying to arrange that meeting. The next question belongs to whoever is listening.