Meet the self-taught Mumbai teen whose AI startup Supermemory raised $2.6 million from Silicon Valley bigwigs

A 19-year-old from Mumbai has secured $2.6 million (around Rs 23 crore) in seed funding for his artificial intelligence startup, Supermemory, attracting investment from some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley, including Google’s AI chief, Jeff Dean.

As reported by TechCrunch, the funding round for Dhravya Shah’s company was led by Susa Ventures, with participation from Browder Capital and SF1.vc. The list of individual investors is a who’s who of the tech industry, featuring DeepMind product manager Logan Kilpatrick, Sentry founder David Cramer and executives from OpenAI, Meta and Google.

Shah’s journey to founding a well-funded AI startup is an unconventional one. Hailing from what he described as a “middle-class” family in Mumbai, he revealed in a past YouTube video that his parents were initially hesitant to buy him a laptop during the pandemic. Once he had it, he taught himself to code.

His first major success came from building a consumer bot that converted tweets into attractive screenshots, which he sold to the social media tool Hypefury. TechCrunch notes that he used the proceeds from that sale to move to the US and enrol at Arizona State University. He later dropped out, relocating to San Francisco to focus entirely on Supermemory.

The startup itself was born from a period of intense productivity. After moving to the US, Shah challenged himself to build a new product every week for 40 weeks. During one of those weeks, he created an early iteration of Supermemory, then called Any Context, and shared it on GitHub. It began as a simple tool allowing users to chat with their Twitter bookmarks.

The platform has since evolved into a sophisticated system designed to enhance the long-term memory of AI models. Supermemory extracts “memories” or insights from unstructured data such as documents, chats, projects and emails. This allows applications to understand and retain context, effectively giving AI the ability to remember previous learnings and apply them later.

Shah explained that the company's core strength lies in extracting insights from any unstructured data to provide applications with greater user context. He added that because Supermemory works across multimodal data, its solution is suitable for a wide range of AI applications, from email clients to video editors.

According to the TechCrunch report, the young entrepreneur’s company is already gaining commercial traction. Its early customers include Cluely, AI video editor Montra and real estate startup Rets, signalling industry confidence in its technology.