There is a useful image from Varun Mayya’s early founder years: December is almost over, salaries are due, and the agency’s cash is running thin. Avalon Labs has grown to around 50 people. That number usually looks impressive in a company profile. On a payroll date, it looks like 50 separate promises. Mayya began calling people who might buy the firm’s services. In the final ten days of the month, he later said, Avalon closed two deals. The company made it through.
It is the kind of story that can become a polished entrepreneurial fable if told too neatly. Yet its practical detail matters. A founder with no easy answer picked up the phone. The work was urgent, unglamorous and dependent on relationships built before the emergency. In Mayya’s subsequent career, relationships and reach became more than insurance. They became the machinery of the business.
Today he is a co-founder of Aeos, a Bengaluru group whose activities include owned media channels, production services, an AI lab, education ventures and a game studio. He also speaks to a large online audience about technology and business. The public persona can move rapidly from the future of work to a software demonstration to a game trailer. The trail behind it starts much earlier, with a student who liked to make things.
A workshop before the audience
Mayya studied computer science engineering at Manipal Institute of Technology from 2011 to 2015. He has said he began coding at 11, but his first formal attempt at business at college involved something distinctly physical: T-shirts. With friends, he started SIZR, a manufacturing venture. Later came digital freelancing for clients in the United States. The combination gave him a founder’s early education in products, customers and the peculiar economics of work sold across borders.
After saving money, he built Jobspire, a recruitment platform. The company raised ₹1.7 crore before its team graduated, according to an account Mayya gave in 2019, and it was acquired by New York-based TurnToTech in 2017. That outcome would make a tidy ending to a first chapter. He instead started another company almost immediately. Avalon Labs, built with Shashank Udupa, began as a services business designed to earn enough to support experiments and investments.
The plan had an internal contradiction. A successful agency can become too busy serving clients to build the products it meant to finance. Mayya described exactly that tension in a later podcast. Avalon worked with clients including MongoDB, Fireside Ventures and Kapiva, and grew to 50 employees. He was frank about the difficulty of giving agency staff a convincing long-term path when the work depended on changing client contracts. His desire to build a product became sharper, even as the agency was doing the thing agencies are supposed to do: finding work.
“When something is fun and interesting enough, you don’t take your eyes off of it.”Varun Mayya, in a 2019 interview
The December scramble belongs to this period. In recounting it, Mayya mentioned an unlikely source of encouragement: Goku, the animated hero of Dragon Ball. He remembered the character getting back up once more after being knocked down. It is an endearingly specific reference for a payroll story. It also fits the founder who would later describe himself on LinkedIn as “Builder, hacker, content creator, idiot.” That last word is self-mockery, and perhaps a way of making ambition sound less solemn.
When the audience became the product
Avalon’s next move began with a community. Mayya and collaborators had audiences on YouTube and other platforms; they gathered some 50,000 people on Discord, he recalled in a podcast. A community that large asks for more than chat rooms. Organizers need places for events, courses, payments and moderation. The group built software around those needs, first under Avalon Meta and then as Scenes, with Abhinav Arora and Shashank Udupa among the founders.
Scenes was a creator community platform that businesses could use under their own brands. It drew backing from investors including Gaurav Munjal and Tanmay Bhat. In June 2023, Unacademy-owned Graphy acquired Scenes for an undisclosed sum. Mayya, then its co-founder and chief executive, said the product and customers had found a home there. The sale was a concrete result of an idea that would continue to shape his work: an audience can reveal a problem, help test a solution and make the solution easier to reach.
That does not mean the audience magically does the hard parts. Software still has to work. Communities need care. In Mayya’s account, the path from a Discord crowd to a commercial platform ran through product decisions and partners. The audience was a starting point, a source of attention and feedback, rather than a substitute for building.
The company behind the camera
Aeos took the lesson further. The company’s published account describes an owned network of channels alongside brand work, video services, education, AI development and games. Its site lists a mix of familiar and specialized names: Varun Mayya for technology and business, AevyTV for culture and commentary, 100xEngineers for applied AI education, and others. Mayya’s own channel is only one window into a much larger operation.
The visible output can make the enterprise seem weightless: videos appear on a phone, a host speaks, an animation flashes, a thought lands. The company describes a more material reality. Teams use rotating physical sets, hired or built for productions, and larger channels can involve as many as 20 people. Its stated approach to AI is selective: use generated elements when they give directors control over a specific shot, and use sets and actors when those are better tools. The distinction is almost quaint in an era eager to call every automated workflow a revolution. A camera still needs somewhere to point.
Aeos says its distribution network supports sponsorships and brings customers to its other businesses. Its own published figures are large and should be read as company-reported numbers. The group’s website describes more than 100 full-time employees across its channels; Mayya’s personal site gives a broader Aeos Group figure of more than 500 employees and says the business remains bootstrapped. The different scopes matter. A channel staff count and a groupwide count tell different stories about the same enterprise.
Mayya and Achina Sirohi Mayya, also an Aeos co-founder, put some of their accumulated thinking into The Content Creator Handbook, published by Ebury Press in November 2024. A handbook from people who run channels has an obvious commercial logic. It also signals that Mayya no longer occupies only the role of the person in the frame. He has become a builder of systems in which other people write, edit, design and perform.
A bigger kind of experiment
In a 2026 video, Mayya looked back over ten projects and named a lesson from each. The list included Jobspire, Scenes, AI tools and the work now happening at Aeos. It was a candid format for a serial builder: some projects worked, some were acquired, and some mainly taught the team what to try next. The video’s premise also offered a quiet correction to the mythology of a single perfect idea. The interesting unit of measurement in his career may be the experiment.
One current experiment has a very different surface from a YouTube explainer. Aeos Games, founded with his brother Rohan Mayya, is developing Unleash the Avatar, an action role-playing game set in an alternate India. The studio has shown early gameplay and discussed photogrammetry, motion capture and Indian locations as part of its process. Aeos says the team began with three people in November 2024 and grew to nearly 40. Early reports cited a 2026 launch plan; a later interview with Rohan pointed to 2027. Game development has a way of putting even energetic timelines in their place.
The game links several of Mayya’s interests. It involves software, visual production, audience-building and stories with an Indian setting. It also exposes the limits of reach: people can watch a trailer, but they will eventually judge a game by what happens when they take the controls. That is a useful test for any company whose distribution is unusually strong. An audience can bring the first players to the door. The work must keep them there.
In September 2026, Mayya described another use for his audience. With OpenAI, he helped run Build What Moves India, a hackathon asking builders to improve frustrating public service website experiences. In his account, more than 13,000 people registered, 250 received mentorship, ten presented in Bengaluru and three won. The numbers matter less than the shift in purpose: a creator who once assembled a community around entrepreneurial ideas was asking that community to work on civic interfaces. The effort was still early, and the winning ideas faced the much harder problem of finding a path into actual public systems.
Mayya’s appetite for the next project can make his career look like a series of hard cuts: recruitment, agency, community software, content, AI, games. Look closely and it resembles a continuing argument with the same question. How do people find something you make, and what does that attention allow you to make after it? The answer changed with each venture. The question, so far, has kept its job.