Vickram
Saigal

In November 2024, Vickram Saigal posted two words on LinkedIn: "Absolutely stoked." He was announcing his arrival at Fundamento as Co-Founder - a Google-backed AI voice agent startup on its fourth anniversary that had quietly become one of India's most technically credible companies in enterprise AI. It wasn't a pivot. It was a destination that had been loading for fifteen years.

Walk backwards through the resume and a pattern emerges. At SaaS Labs from 2022 to 2024, he led product and design for JustCall - a phone system for sales and support teams - through hypergrowth, a $42M Series B, and an eventual Deloitte Technology Fast 500 ranking. Before that, he spent four and a half years at Adobe in San Francisco building the core platform for Adobe Advertising Cloud: low-latency digital identity systems, privacy architecture, trust and safety layers, and ecosystem integrations that served enterprise clients at scale. Before that, an MBA at Chicago Booth. Before that, IDEO.org in Tanzania. Before that, the Gates Foundation in Ethiopia. Before that, Bain.

Each move looked lateral from the outside. From the inside, each was a narrowing toward something: technology that changes how people communicate, at scale, with rigor.

He grew up in Delhi, studied at the University of Delhi, then spent three years at Bain & Company - the kind of consulting that gives you a frameworks vocabulary and a discomfort with vague problems. But it was Ethiopia that changed the texture of his thinking. Working with the Gates Foundation and the Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Agency, he led public-private partnerships to attract global investment. The number he raised: $20M+. The thing he was actually doing: getting the world's largest development organizations and private capital to agree on something. That requires a different skill set than writing decks.

At IDEO.org - the impact design arm of IDEO, the firm that invented the term "design thinking" - he conducted field research across Tanzania studying how 10 million mobile financial service users actually interact with technology. Not as a researcher observing from above. On the ground. That's the education that shows up later when he argues against product managers who copy competitors instead of interviewing customers.

Adobe hired Vickram as a Product Manager in December 2018. He was promoted to Senior Product Manager by July 2021. The role: Adobe Advertising Cloud, a platform that helps enterprises manage digital advertising across channels. His specific domain - identity, privacy, trust and safety, and ecosystem integrations - was the plumbing nobody sees but everyone depends on. These are the systems that must be correct, because when they're not, the consequences compound across millions of user sessions.

Low-latency identity management for enterprise advertising isn't glamorous. It's the kind of work where shipping something wrong at 2 PM means the CEO is getting calls by 5. It's also precisely the kind of engineering context that makes someone valuable in a startup: you understand what reliable infrastructure costs to build, and you stop underestimating it.

In February 2022, Vickram joined SaaS Labs as Head of Product - a company building JustCall, a cloud phone system for sales and support teams that integrates with over 100 business tools. He inherited a 20-person product and design team. Over two years, the company grew 2x, raised a $42M Series B led by Sequoia Capital India, ranked on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 twice, and launched JustCall iQ - a conversational intelligence platform with call scoring, AI coaching, and SMS automation.

What made the tenure notable wasn't just the growth metrics. It was how he led: he's publicly argued against the Indian startup tendency toward long PRDs and PowerPoint product strategy, preferring what he calls "thoughtful, minimal documentation that invites collaboration." He pushed for a US-style tripod model - product, design, engineering as genuine equals - in an environment that defaults to a pyramid with PMs at the top. That's a cultural change that doesn't show up in funding announcements.

He left in March 2024. A deliberate sabbatical followed. He wanted to think before the next move, a discipline that's genuinely rare in a world that rewards perpetual motion over considered direction.

Fundamento was founded in 2020 by Durga and Megha Aggarwal. Backed by Google, it's built a voice AI platform specifically for enterprise contact centers in financial services - the high-stakes end of customer interaction where a wrong answer costs a customer and a compliant answer is legally necessary. By its fourth anniversary, it had become one of the credible names in Indian enterprise AI, not through hype but through actual deployments at scale.

Vickram joined as Co-Founder in November 2024 to lead product and technology. His thesis is direct: voice will be the dominant interface for India's next phase of digital adoption. Not because it's trendy, but because India has 22 official languages and hundreds of dialects, and a text-based interface will always exclude more people than a voice one. The contact center isn't just a cost center to automate. It's the place where enterprises meet real customers in real language.

The role is a synthesis of everything prior. The systems rigor from Adobe. The customer empathy from IDEO. The startup tempo from SaaS Labs. The development-sector instinct that technology's job is to reach people who aren't already reached.

In April 2025, he was already posting about Fundamento's voice agents being used by GLAD - Governance Labs and Data - to deliver social impact in rural communities. The arc from Ethiopia to Bengaluru isn't a coincidence.

In an interview with The Product Roadmap, Vickram laid out a set of views that are worth extracting because they're specific enough to be wrong - and they're not.

On India vs. US product culture: Indian teams, he says, run a pyramid model - product manager at the top, making decisions. American teams run a tripod - product, design, and engineering as genuine partners. The pyramid is faster in the short run. The tripod produces better products over time, because no single discipline has a monopoly on insight about what customers need.

On documentation: long PRDs overwhelm teams without inviting them into the thinking. Short documents that open questions are more useful than long documents that close them. This is a minority opinion in organizations that measure product rigor by page count.

On competition-driven product strategy: "Copying what competitors build is the fastest way to be second." First-principles customer research is the only durable source of differentiation. He's watched Indian PM teams, talented and hungry as he describes them, get stuck in feature-parity cycles that feel like progress but aren't. His prescription is simple: talk to users, not competitors.

On career management: the most dangerous assumption a PM can make is that good work speaks for itself. "Own your career progression" isn't advice to play politics. It's advice to be explicit about what you're building toward, with the people who have influence over it.

He has 360 photographs on Flickr. He's serious about photography in the way people who travel for field research become serious about it - as documentation, as observation, as the habit of noticing what other people walk past. His Instagram handle is @vickram51. The number probably means nothing to outsiders, but the consistency of the handle across platforms suggests someone who chose a digital identity before it was an optimization problem.

He does pottery. Not as a productivity hack or a wellness practice but as a genuine creative pursuit. There's something structurally interesting about a person who works in the abstract - product strategy, systems architecture, market positioning - and returns to an art form where the physical material pushes back. Clay doesn't ship with edge cases. It just cracks.

His mother Neelum Saigal built a business called Bric-a-Brac from scratch, starting nearly thirty years ago. It won the UNESCO Seal of Excellence in 2006 for glazed terracotta tableware that combined cane and wood. The products were displayed at UNESCO's booth at Maison et Objet in Paris. She runs it from a studio workshop in Manesar, Gurgaon. Vickram is helping her take it online as a D2C brand - not as a side hustle for himself, but as support for what she built. The irony of a product leader who has managed digital transformation at scale now doing it for his mother's homegrown handicraft brand is not lost on him.