Hi, I’m Kunal.

I started making things before I really knew what I was doing. In college I built a clothing brand called Foolstop. I didn’t have a plan or a mentor or any idea what I was doing — I just had an idea I couldn’t let go of, so I chased it.

I sold it before I graduated. I didn’t realise it at the time, but that was the moment I found out who I am: someone who has to build the thing in his head, whatever it takes.

I sold Foolstop with a bit of money in my pocket and a head full of confidence. I genuinely thought I could take on the world and change it. I wanted to build something that would actually help people — and boy, was I in for a lesson.

It was 2017. My co-founder and I set out to build wearables that could get help to someone in danger faster — built for a country where, when something goes wrong, help can take hours to arrive. We believed in it completely. We got a working prototype. We even earned letters of intent from the Maharashtra State Government — people with real power looked at what we were doing and said yes.

And then we couldn’t build it. The technology wasn’t ready, we were young, and the thing we’d promised slipped out of our hands. I won’t pretend it was a clean “learning experience.” It hurt. We’d gotten people to believe in us, and we couldn’t deliver. I carried that for a long time.

For years I thought we failed because we weren’t good enough. We didn’t. We were too early — the technology we needed simply didn’t exist yet. It does now. That’s the difference, and it’s the whole reason I’m willing to try again.

After GEM fell apart, I couldn’t bring myself to touch tech for a while. But I’ve never been able to stop building — and whatever I build, all I really want is to scale it as far as it’ll go.

So I went into the family’s food business. I took one restaurant to four, in Mumbai — one of the most expensive cities in India to do it. For a while, it worked.

Then COVID hit, and I lost everything. Went into debt. I spent the next stretch doing freelance work to claw my way out, and I paid back every rupee I owed.

Around then, life pulled me home to Nagpur — and the couple of years that followed were some of the hardest of my life. Building anything wasn’t possible. It took me a long time to find my feet again. At the start of 2025, when I was finally ready to work, I started Gentrix.

At the start of 2025, when I was finally ready to work again, I started Gentrix. After everything, I needed to prove to myself that I could still take something all the way. So I got my hands dirty.

I built it completely on my own — the products, the brand, the storefront, the boxes that go out the door. No team, no agency. Just me figuring out every single piece of how you take a real product all the way to a real customer.

It wasn’t glamorous. Most of it was packing orders and fixing problems nobody sees. But it gave me something back: the proof that I could still build, and still finish. You can buy it today — that’s the part I’m proud of.

Then one day, in the middle of 2025, Prudhvi called me. He said: