You don’t always get what you want, and you don’t always get what you think you deserve. But you will always get what you consistently work on.
We recently celebrated 10 years of Melento. When I look back, I don’t see a straight line. I see a series of unexpected turns, a few crazy bets, some stubborn persistence, and a belief that kept getting stronger every time the odds seemed to suggest otherwise.
Today, we are a profitable, globally scaling technology company, working with 3,000+ enterprises across 40+ countries and processing close to 100 million digital transactions every year. Our technology is used by some of the most respected names across financial services, fintech, healthcare, and consumer businesses, such as Axis, Kotak, Netflix, L’Oréal, Volvo, and Panasonic, among others. We have expanded beyond India and are now taking our technology to global markets. And we have done it without raising a single dollar of venture capital. That part of the story is what I am most proud of.
It Began With Curiosity
In 2008, a water-cooler conversation in Arlington, Virginia, gave me a startup idea. That idea became my first venture, and by 2010 I had left corporate life and was running my own company. I wasn’t in Silicon Valley, but I became a student of everything happening there: startups, technology, business models, and the sheer audacity of building something from nothing. I wanted startup glory. What I got was an education.
When I returned to India, another ordinary experience, a visit to an RTO office, led to another extraordinary idea. That eventually became LegalDesk. Ashok and I had been classmates but hadn’t been in touch for years, and somehow we found ourselves building this company together. We were complementary in almost every way: technology and business, product and sales, perfection and execution. It worked.
Then Came a Conversation That Changed Everything
I heard Nandan Nilekani speak about Aadhaar and India Stack at an iSPIRT event, and we saw an opportunity to make electronic signatures truly digital. So we built it, and then we invited Nandan to launch it. He said yes. That moment changed the trajectory of the company.
We were early to a market that was about to become enormous.
Customers came, the team grew, and transactions multiplied, and we learnt what it really means to build for enterprise scale. The journey wasn’t always smooth, but we kept building. Then COVID accelerated the world around us. Businesses suddenly needed to operate digitally, and paper-heavy processes had to disappear almost overnight. We were ready. The product we had spent years building had suddenly become infrastructure that businesses couldn’t do without. That was our inflection point.
From Surviving To Scaling
The years that followed were about building at speed: people, product, technology, enterprise relationships, culture, and execution. Today, Melento powers critical workflows for thousands of enterprises globally. We have been recognized by the industry and analysts for our next-gen AI capabilities, driven by the world’s first collaborative intelligence.
But the numbers and logos tell only part of the story. The bigger achievement is that a company started by two founders has become a technology platform trusted at enterprise scale, built in India, serving the world and doing it profitably. Eventually, what you want, what you deserve, and what you get will all converge, with passion being the glue. That gives us a very different kind of confidence about what comes next.
Because The Next Chapter Is Bigger
For a decade, we built the infrastructure that helped businesses digitize transactions. Now, we are building the intelligence that can transform how businesses work. AI is changing the nature of work, and software is becoming increasingly autonomous. Business processes are moving from digital to intelligent to agentic. This is where Melento wants to play.
Our ambition remains the same “passion statement” that has been on the wall of our office for years:
Create digital infrastructure to power businesses across the world.
Only now, the definition of digital infrastructure has changed, and so has the size of the opportunity.
Ten years ago, we were trying to prove that the idea could work. Today, we have thousands of enterprises, millions of transactions, global markets, and a new generation of AI products behind us. The next ten years aren’t about celebrating what we built. They are about building what the world hasn’t seen yet. That is the journey I am most excited about, and we sincerely thank everyone who has been part of this incredible journey.
The next starts here.
