This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Akshat Prakash, the 27-year-old CTO of Camb.ai, based in Mountain View and Dubai. It’s been edited for length and clarity.
I was born in a small village near New Delhi into a family of doctors who prioritized education. My father and I traveled to many different places, even when I was young.
We moved from India to Ireland when I was in the second grade, and five years later, we moved back to India. I came to the US in 2016 for my undergraduate degree.
10 years later, I split my time between California and the UAE as the CTO of an AI startup I cofounded with my dad.
I majored in computer science with minors in IoT and AI
After my first year of college at Carnegie Mellon, I wanted to find a summer internship because I always believed in hands-on learning.
In the summer of 2017, I worked as an Android intern at Maven Machines, a startup that did truck and fleet logistics in Pittsburgh. The next summer, I interned at Intuit, where I created Android applications. I interned at Microsoft in the summer of 2019.
All my internships were paid, and as an international student from India and a bachelor, it was life-changing money. It made me realize how well tech pays.
I graduated at the end of 2019
I did a lot of research in college, particularly in speech and translation. After graduation, I sought jobs that would complement my research acumen.
I landed a job as a software engineer on the Siri team at Apple in March 2020, which was my dream job. I applied online because my profile was a good fit for a research position. I ended up on a specialized team within Siri called the Web Answers Team. I was part of building one of Siri’s first versions of a ChatGPT-like system.
I always knew I wanted to pursue entrepreneurship, but I wasn’t clear on what kind of company I wanted to start.
I’ve spoken English all my life, but when I reached Pittsburgh, one of my first experiences left an imprint
I went to a Starbucks and asked the lady for a coffee. She asked me many questions, and I was like, wait a minute, was that English? I couldn’t understand what she was saying, even though she spoke English.
At that moment, it struck me that even though I spoke English, people from different cultures spoke the same language differently.
Technology has made my life much easier and more convenient, but the language barriers and biases that my father faced 30 years ago when he was growing up are the same types I faced. I wanted to build an AI company that leveraged my core competency and passion, and my Starbucks experience made me realize it would be in translation.
After two years at Apple, I quit in 2022 to start my own business
In early 2022, I started exploring a few ideas, building prototypes, and talking to a few investors and VCs. I looked young, and the VCs and investors didn’t take me seriously, so I asked my dad to sit in on my calls and say he was the CEO.
My dad believed in my vision, and it was natural for him to quit his then job and become full-time at Camb.ai. We incorporated as a US Delaware C Corp in late 2022. On January 1, 2023, we officially started Camb.ai as a father-son duo, with him as the official CEO and me as the CTO.
Our earliest investor was a Singapore-based deep-tech fund called TRTL Ventures, which gave us our first check.
We brought some founding engineers and employees on full-time
We formed our initial team of six: two salespeople, the founders, and a few research R&D engineers. After we raised our pre-seed round, my father and I still didn’t draw salaries. We lived off our savings at the time because we wanted to pay our first employees.
In mid-2023, we were introduced to Courtside Ventures. They became interested in our application for real-time sports commentary.
We raised a decent seed round of around $4 million, which was when we formed our board, and my dad and I finally started taking proper salaries.
We started spending more capital on GPUs, subscriptions to platforms like Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and what we needed to host and scale the models.
We started to take the software to market in January 2024
We targeted the YouTube creator market to gather insights and help build a better product, and we secured a contract to dub an entire movie from Arabic to Mandarin. Once we got this movie contract, we shifted our focus. We saw a gap. Nobody in enterprise was thinking about AI or simultaneous speech-to-speech translation.
In January 2024, we received an offer to dub the Australian Open’s post-match interviews. That opened the world to our brand, and we received inbound business from sports and media enterprises.
I now spend around 60% of my time in Dubai, and 40% traveling
My father is domiciled in Dubai, which is a great central location because it lies between many international time zones. I travel internationally almost every other week.
Twenty percent of our team is in Dubai, and the rest are remote or global. A majority of our sales and business development team is within North America.
I have meetings on US time at around 6 p.m. in Dubai. I work until around 2 a.m. when I’m there.
My father is a classic CEO, and I’m a classic CTO
Beyond being a father-son duo, we’re also a complementary fit, which is important in the founding team.
I come from a traditional Indian family, where doing a job is the only thing you’re supposed to do. Taking risks is considered foolish — stability is the goal.
I could’ve continued to work at Apple, but I would’ve become and remained a cog in the system.
Choosing my father as my cofounder was worth it
What typically happens is a father builds a great business empire and then gives it to the kid. It’s unique for us to have come together as father and son, 30 years apart, and have just built the company together.
It has its pros and cons, but it’s completely worth it because there was no better cofounder for my dad or me.
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