Two paths.One dessert problem.

I’d been circling this problem for years before Audacious had a name.

At Berkeley Haas, I was a member of Food @ Haas - the community of people building the next generation of food brands. And I led a team at the Alt: Meat Lab, working with nutrition science and biochemistry majors on a problem that sounds small until you try to solve it: making soy milk without the aftertaste.

Enzymatic processing. Months of iteration. The lab was later featured in the Netflix documentary You Are What You Eat.

That was the first time I understood the thing this whole company is built on - "healthy" tasting bad is not a law of nature. It’s an unsolved problem. Most people just stopped trying to solve it.

Living in the Bay Area also gave me an accidental education in premium sugar-free - a whole shelf of brands treating it as a category worth doing properly. I tasted my way through most of it. Then I’d come home to India and taste what was here, and it was a different world - thin, chalky, aftertaste on the finish, compromise dressed up as a category.

In July 2026 I moved back to India and started Audacious with Indrani.

I was the customer for this long before Audacious had a name.

I’ve spent years reviewing food and working with food brands. I know what good is supposed to taste like, and how rarely the shelf delivers it.

I train six days a week, and I wasn’t willing to let that cost me dessert. Nothing on the shelf held up, so I started developing my own, iterating formulation by formulation until it held up against the full-sugar version.

It started in a conversation. When Ananjan and I began paying attention to what was actually out there - the sugar-free treats & desserts on both sides, in the US and in India - we realized how far short India fell. I’d already been developing my own - turns out I’d been solving the problem before I knew it was one. That’s when we saw Audacious for what it could be: something worth building, here.

Before this, I spent three years at Cummins in people strategy, across two very different roles. In the first, I worked closely with R&D leaders and learned how something goes from an idea to a real product. The second took me out to a manufacturing site, where I learned how operations actually run - compliance, discipline, and above all quality: the standard that simply can’t be compromised.

Time on a shop floor teaches you what consistency costs.

Product and operations, it turns out, is those two things put together.

Formulation, ingredient sourcing, texture, taste - these are the parts of the business I own. At Audacious I lead product and operations: formulation development, the taste standard, and the details that decide whether something’s good enough.

I was the customer before I was the founder.