Two people who kept noticing the same gap on the same shelf.
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’d been rebuilding my own relationship with food long before Audacious had a name.
I’ve spent years writing about food - reviews, recipes, brand collaborations - microblogging on Instagram. I know what good is supposed to taste like.
About two years ago I got serious about fitness - six days a week, consistently, the kind of routine that actually delivers. I wasn’t going to let it cost me the things I loved eating, dessert most of all. So I started building alternatives in my own kitchen, recipe by recipe, working out how to make what I used to eat fit the way I now wanted to live.
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 quietly building 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.
We spent months at our kitchen counter in SF and Pune debating texture, sweeteners, and what "better for you and genuinely good" actually meant when the customer might be a 55-year-old who’d been told to give up sugar and missed his grandmother’s caramel custard, or a 30-year-old fitness enthusiast who hadn’t eaten a store-bought dessert in five years.
We wanted to build the thing that didn’t exist. So we’re building it.
Two products. Each built deliberately around what that dessert actually needs. A category that has waited too long for someone to take it seriously.
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