He Raised $93 Million To Provide Companies With AI Camera Systems And Video Intelligence Software To Improve Safety And Efficiency

Rish Gupta has had a long, winding journey filled with unexpected turns, painful challenges, and exhilarating wins. He has built and exited companies and is currently riding the incredible momentum and hype in the artificial intelligence world of AGIs.

Rish’s path started in the bustling streets of Delhi, India, where an early exposure to sports, mathematics, and business set the foundation for a lifelong passion for building and scaling companies.

In this engrossing interview, Rish talks about the sequence of events that led to moving to the US, building his network, and establishing his latest company, Spot AI.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

Growing Up in Delhi: A Foundation for Resilience

Born and raised in Delhi, Rish grew up in an environment that balanced academics and athletics. With access to one of the city’s best sporting facilities, he spent his childhood immersed in various sports—tennis, swimming, horse riding, squash, and more—while excelling in math Olympiads.

But beyond the structured world of school and sports, a deeper curiosity was brewing. Rish was fascinated by individuals who built things from scratch—whether it was scientific theorems, revolutionary companies, or entirely new industries.

Icons like Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Howard Hughes, and Henry Ford weren’t just names in books; they were blueprints for a future he wanted to create.

First Forays into Business: The College Hustles

Like many entrepreneurial minds, Rish’s journey began with a series of side hustles in college. His first venture was a classic student startup—creating a newsletter that aggregated cool events around campus and sought to monetize it through advertising.

While the idea had potential, execution proved challenging, and after two editions, the project fizzled out. However, a more promising opportunity soon emerged.

One evening, while watching a movie with a friend whose father owned a large network of buses in India, they saw a bus in New York wrapped in an advertisement. It struck them: Why weren’t buses in India being used as advertising spaces?

Without hesitation, they got a carpenter to create makeshift banners, attached them to three buses, and pitched the concept of advertising on buses to major consumer goods companies like Pepsi, Unilever, and Heinz.

These companies were making big inroads into India and needed the last mile distribution and advertising channels. The response was overwhelmingly positive. What started as an experiment turned into a highly profitable venture, generating millions of rupees in just six months.

Rish and his friend then took it one step further. They created a cassette recording and played the audio ads on bus speakers in between music–to gain more traction.

LetsIntern.com: Solving a Real Problem

The success of the bus advertising venture gave Rish a taste of entrepreneurship, but his real breakthrough came with LetsIntern.com. The problem was clear—India’s top colleges lacked a culture of internships. Rish and his team set out to solve this.

Students graduated without real-world experience, creating a stark disconnect between academia and industry. Rish was already doing side hustles at the time, which were basically a bunch of random stuff. His friends were excited about the idea of internships and wanted in on it.

LetsIntern.com started as a simple platform to help students find internships, but the challenge was figuring out the business model. Attracting students was relatively easy—Rish and his co-founders, Mayank Batheja and Pranay Swarup, had a strong network in colleges.

Rish also had his parents’ support. However, they needed top companies to list internship opportunities to create demand and entice students to sign up. Their solution? Identify 100 aspirational companies and hustle their way into meetings.

The trio convinced companies to post internships for free, creating the initial traction needed to make LetsIntern a go-to platform. Everyone in the company was between 20 and 25 years old and was working their first jobs, figuring out sales, marketing, and other aspects on their own.

Rish recalls how challenging it was to develop the business model, customer profile, value proposition, and monetizing techniques.

The Scrappy Beginnings: Doing Things That Didn’t Scale

In the early days, automation was a luxury they couldn’t afford. The trio built a simple web-to-web page where companies could post jobs and students could post replies. Rish and his co-founders manually matched students with companies, working late into the night while sipping beers.

Since they didn’t have a matching engine, every Friday, they painstakingly sent thousands of emails to their growing user base—copying and pasting in Gmail since mass-emailing tools weren’t widely accessible, at the time.

The trio also discovered an unconventional way to fund marketing—charging students for career workshops. By bringing in big names like Microsoft, HP, and Franklin Templeton, they not only provided students with valuable career insights but also generated revenue to reinvest in growth.

Marathons and Mindset: The Mental Game of Entrepreneurship

Launching a company at a young age is intimidating. While Rish’s friends were securing lucrative jobs in consulting and banking, he was grappling with self-doubt. Could he really turn a side hustle into a full-time venture?

Rish’s answer came from an unexpected challenge: running a marathon. With just four weeks to train and no prior long-distance running experience, he pushed through the pain and exhaustion of race day in Mumbai’s sweltering heat.

A thought crystallized in the final six miles: “If I can endure this, I can handle anything.” The next day, Rish took his mother out to dinner and declared his decision—he was going all-in on LetsIntern.com.

It’s no surprise that many entrepreneurs are drawn to endurance sports. Marathons, much like startups, are grueling tests of resilience, mental fortitude, and an ability to embrace discomfort.

In retrospect, Rish opines that choosing to be an entrepreneur and starting something new is like picking a painful path. One that is full of rejection, failures, and self-doubt with a lot of dark days. And, of course, a lot of pain.

Building LetsIntern to 4 Million Users

LetsIntern didn’t just grow—it exploded. Within a few years, the platform had amassed over 4 million users, becoming a go-to resource for students and companies. The road, however, wasn’t easy.

Monetization remained a tricky puzzle, but they cracked the code through sheer grit, persistence, and experimentation. From grassroots marketing tactics to innovative revenue streams, LetsIntern became a self-sustaining ecosystem, bridging the gap between students and employers.

Eventually, in 2015, the company was acquired. Looking back at the experience, Rish talks about the highest highs and lowest lows of emotional cycles. There were weeks when the team was convinced they were doing really well. At others, not so much.

Rish and co-founders persevered, learning sales, marketing, hiring, and other aspects. “The important thing is to keep your head in the game and come out of the emotional cycles,” he says.

Moving to the US

When building Letsintern.com in India, Rish and his co-founders spent a lot of time reading and learning about building a company. He realized all the information and articles came from the Valley in San Francisco, YC, Paul Graham, and other influential entities.

Rish also realized that if he wanted to build another company, it would have to be in the Florence of the Renaissance. Moving to the US was challenging but also in a way which is counterintuitive to most people, he says.

As Rish explains, he had grown up speaking English as a native language. He attended English-speaking private schools, reading the same books, watching the same movies, and listening to the same songs. Cultural integration wasn’t a problem.

However, Rish realized he had no inbuilt social networks in the country. He didn’t have a family in the US so he couldn’t depend on their network. Nor did he have a set of high school or college friends whose network he could rely on.

Connecting with people was very challenging, without any known power structures, privileges, or access tools to navigate the social ecosystem around him.

Another challenge Rish faced was that the US startup ecosystem did not value companies built outside the country even if they were billion-dollar mega companies. American entrepreneurs would automatically get access to more networks.

Building a Network and the Power of Credentials

When Rish first started reaching out to people, his success rate was dismal. He would send emails introducing himself, sharing his experience with building and selling a company, and requesting meetings. The response rate? A staggering 95% of emails went unanswered.

This forced Rish to rethink his approach: How to get access to the right networks? How to surround yourself with the right people? How to acquire that prestige or that set of people to become a part of the default network and spread nodes with the first 5 or 10 connections?

Rish realized there were two primary ways to do this. One path was to join a prestigious company like Stripe, Dropbox, or Google, where his professional network would expand from within naturally. The other was to gain credibility by attending a top-tier university such as Stanford or Harvard.

Rish chose the latter because he didn’t want to work for someone else at that stage in his career. Once at Stanford, he tested his hypothesis—he sent the same emails with the same content, but this time using a Stanford.edu email address. His response rate skyrocketed from 5% to 90%.

It was eye-opening to see how much weight people placed on credentials, even when his experience and capabilities had not changed. The Stanford experience did more than just improve his email open rates.

It was a phenomenal environment for networking, building friendships, and eventually Rish meeting his co-founder. But instead of jumping straight into his next venture, he decided to gain more hands-on experience by working at another company.

That led him to Samsara, whose founder has also been on the Dealmakers Podcast.

Developing a Unique Perspective on Technology

By the end of Rish’s first year at Stanford, he had developed a firm conviction that he wanted to work at the intersection of hardware and software. At that time, in 2016, Stanford’s startup ecosystem was obsessed with building mobile apps.

Snapchat had recently exploded in popularity, Instagram was still on the rise, and Uber was becoming a dominant force. About 95% of students were focused on building the next big app, but to Rish, that signaled a saturated space.

The general prevailing logic was that there were three kinds of systems to build on top of–operating systems of app stores, mobile phones, and desktop computers. However, the number of laptops or PCs being sold was static and mobile phones had maxed out.

Vendors were competing for one or two spots out of the 10 million apps that are going to get released that year. And, an average person had about 60 apps on their phone with only updates for one or two apps each year.

Rather than competing in an overcrowded market, Rish started looking at emerging computing paradigms. He noticed the rise of smart home devices—Alexa, Philips Bluetooth lights, and various connected sensors that were gaining traction.

It became clear to Rish that the next wave of computing would involve embedding chips and sensors into everything and everywhere–from factories to homes. However, he soon realized he lacked any experience in hardware.

Everyone Rish spoke to—those who had worked at companies like Nest—warned him about hardware’s difficulty. Their warnings only fueled his determination to learn. He sought out early-stage companies that were excelling in hardware and software integration.

Samsara, which was in its Series B stage at the time, stood out. Rish reached out to an early team member and essentially said, “I’ll do any role—just let me be part of the team.” Eventually, he ended up leading a product line at Samsara, gaining invaluable insights that would later influence Spot AI.

The Journey to Co-Founding Spot AI

Rish’s entrepreneurial journey took an unconventional turn. While his co-founders, Tanuj Thapliyal and Sud Bhatija, were initially working on the idea for Spot AI right after graduation, he decided to join Samsara. However, he stayed connected with them, even investing in their early-stage efforts.

A year later, they were still in the ideation phase, with zero revenue and no product traction. That was when Tanuj asked, “Why are you trying to start something from scratch? We’ve been talking for a year, and we know each other well. Just join Spot AI as a co-founder.”

The trio restructured the company’s cap table to reflect their new partnership, and by late 2019, they rebuilt the product. In early 2020, they finally began selling. It was a full-circle moment, going from being an early investor to joining as a co-founder when the company needed a new direction.

Spot AI’s Business Model and Growth

Spot AI operates on a simple but powerful business model. As Rish explains, there are over 100 million cameras deployed across U.S. businesses, and Spot AI’s mission is to make these cameras more valuable.

Instead of charging per user like traditional SaaS models, the company charges a subscription fee based on the number of camera feeds processed through its system. A company with 500 cameras across its facilities pays a monthly subscription for those 500 feeds.

To give a sense of scale, the amount of video data Spot AI processes daily is twice the amount of net new videos uploaded to YouTube every day. This data volume demonstrates its immense impact on making the physical world more intelligent.

Initially, Rish and his co-founders focused on building a software platform that worked across all camera brands, but over time, they expanded into AI-driven insights. Today, their cameras act as extra teammates, helping businesses improve safety, operations, and security.

Rish explains that the AI curve is now making those cameras so much more and more useful, considering all the agentic software or large language models in the digital world.

Imagine asking ChatGPT to analyze a factory’s safety conditions—but instead of relying on text-based inputs, it has real-time video intelligence. That’s where Spot AI is headed.

Transitioning to CEO

The transition from a non-CEO co-founder to CEO was a natural progression. Rish’s co-founder Tanuj had to step back due to family health emergencies. By then, Rish had built and led multiple functions within the company, including product, engineering, sales, and customer success.

The key difference between being a co-founder and the CEO is decision-making. As CEO, Rish sometimes has to make tough calls that his co-founders initially disagreed with, but his job was to bring them along on the journey.
Fundraising: The Rollercoaster Ride
To date, Spot AI has raised about $93M. The fundraising journey has reflected the broader trends in venture capital. Rish explains that for entrepreneurs building a company in 2020 or 2021, raising capital was relatively easy.

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At that time, funding was abundant, and VCs were chasing companies rather than vice versa. Cash was a zero interest rate phenomenon and deal values were higher.

Rish and his team raised multiple rounds during that period, often preemptively, without having to formally go out and pitch. However, as they scaled and market conditions changed, fundraising became more data and metric-driven.

Investors started focusing on growth efficiency, revenue metrics, and operational scalability rather than just potential. The last couple of rounds have required deeper scrutiny, but Spot AI’s strong fundamentals have helped it continue securing funding.

The Future of AI and Spot AI’s Role

As Rish points out, AI has undergone significant shifts over the last few years. Initially, the focus was on model-layer AI—VCs believed everything would be built at the model level, leaving little room for AI applications. That perspective has drastically changed in the last 18 months.

At Spot AI, Rish and his co-founders have seen the rise of voice and text-based AI applications, automation in engineering, and advancements in robotics. Yet, video-based AI is still in its infancy. That’s what excites them the most at Spot AI.

Rish and his team have built a solid customer base of 1000+ customers, a really good business model, and a great technology stack. He strongly believes they are just scratching the surface of what’s possible with AI-powered video intelligence.

The opportunity ahead is massive, and Spot AI is committed to leading this transformation in the physical world. As Rish sees it, video inflection is going to happen over the next 18 months.

That’s because since context windows are getting bigger, the models can actually process more videos with less. Rish believes the next two years are going to be incredibly exciting. After five years of building the company, Spot AI is at the most profound moment of its journey.

Spot AI stands at the right place with the right set of technologies inflecting with enough scale. With enough capital, Rish thinks they can exploit this incredible opportunity. Looking ahead, he envisions Spot AI enabling AI to use cameras which will act like its eyes.

AI will not only automate inspection compliance work that happens in the world, but also use the eyes to actually control things in the physical world, whether it’s machine telemetry, robotic arms, gates and sensors, and other devices on the floor.

Spot AI will soon be this automated layer where camera eyes can be used to actually do the work and not just give data insights on a chart, graph, or report. Companies will operate incredibly more safely, drastically reducing accidents and security incidents.

People can operate more productively without labor shortage problems, especially in the manufacturing sector–a serious problem in the US. Spot AI can improve productivity by 10% and safety by 50%.

The Road Ahead

Having built and scaled multiple ventures, Rish Gupta’s entrepreneurial journey is far from over. Now riding the wave of AI-driven innovation, he continues to push boundaries, explore new opportunities, and inspire the next generation of founders.

From bootstrapping a student startup to building a platform with millions of users, his story is a testament to the power of grit, adaptability, and an unshakable belief in one’s vision.

For aspiring entrepreneurs, Rish’s journey serves as both inspiration and a blueprint for navigating the chaotic yet rewarding world of startups. He advises not measuring yourself on outcomes and simply following curiosity and your instincts. He also suggests resilience when things look bad.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• Rish’s first taste of business came from creative college side hustles, including a lucrative bus advertising venture.
• He co-founded LetsIntern.com to bridge the gap between students and internships, growing it to 4 million users before its acquisition.
• Running a marathon reinforced Rish’s belief that entrepreneurship requires mental toughness and persistence.
• Moving to the U.S., Rish faced challenges in building a network but leveraged Stanford’s credibility to gain access.
• Rish identified the future of computing in embedded hardware and gained hands-on experience at Samsara before launching Spot AI.
• Initially an investor, Rish later joined Spot AI to help rebuild the product and drive growth.
• Spot AI enhances the value of millions of cameras by leveraging AI-driven insights, processing more video data daily than YouTube uploads.

 

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