our story is still evolving, and being written every single day by the people we work with and the problems we work on

Why are we the best team to antimattr/Light? We have come across this question several times - this is a brief attempt to answer that. Our story is not that straightforward and rather full of experiments, failures, and setbacks - with islands of successes in the middle.

Sirsho and I (Sridipto) are childhood friends and neighbors, hailing from a town on the outskirts of Kolkata called Kalyani. My natural inclination was toward mathematics from the very childhood and that same inclination led to questioning outcomes for everything followed by trying to find creative solutions. I was introduced to Number Theory (divisibility, modular arithmetic, gcd, etc.) when I was in grade 8 and I got instantly hooked on it. Later, I got to know Number Theory combined with Combinatorics, Calculus, and Statistics is the foundation of all our computer operations and algorithms.

Seeing my natural interest in mathematics (and physics, not chemistry) my parents realized I should prepare for IIT - as if they wouldn't have if I were not interested in mathematics. :)

I started college in 2019 at IIT-BHU, Metallurgical Engineering - chemistry again, irony. I screwed-up during counseling.

Sirsho started college at KIIT Bhuvaneshwar, computer science engineering.

College was expensive - roughly ₹10 lakh (~$11k) in four years. I thought of starting something to make sure I would be able to collect my entire college fees by the end of the fourth year. Started with making content for higher-education companies in mathematics and physics; alongside started teaching IIT aspirants.

Down the line sometime in 2020, we thought of building something in the tech space as we were following it closely and felt a strong pull toward building a tech-consumer brand. To fund our endeavors we started taking up internships where we worked directly with founders and understood how to build MVPs and start a startup. The internships helped me understand what it takes to build a company - I worked across product, marketing, and growth. I also worked closely with founders and helped them raise capital. In short, I understood how the entire startup ecosystem functions.

At the same time, along with Sirsho, I tried building a few things however, none took off as a business at scale - an LMS for colleges and an e-commerce for artisans.

In January 2022 when we were in the third year of college, we started building a gamified learning platform for high school students in the education space - think of it like "Duolingo for test-prep". We were focussing on a community-driven learning approach in the test-prep space, targeted at the Tier 2 towns and below, student aspirants to go the esteemed Engineering & Medical Colleges of India (planned to expand to other domains later on) through vernacular content for better comprehension & consumption. Additionally, a point-based reward system was there to ensure a highly engaged user besides giving them extended rewards. By October, the app had more than 10k+ downloads. We raised ₹60 lakh (~$75k) in September from a Bangalore-based VC, called Turbostart - the idea was to scale to 100k users in the next 12 months go for a seed round, and hit $500k ARR in the next 3 years. We onboarded 100k+ students on the platform by April 2023.

However, we failed to secure the seed round considering the ed-tech funding was at an all-time low in 2023. We decided to pivot to keep the business alive and to lower dependency on fundraising.

Anshul was working at Turbostart (from January 2023) to support their portfolio startups with marketing, business, and growth. He worked with Snipe closely as well. However, it was at this time that we decided (July 2023) to pivot when we spent the most time with Anshul figuring out what to build next.

We built a good camaraderie with each other and I asked Anshul to join us as a co-founder and lead business, operations, and marketing. He decided to join us in our journey as a co-founder and fully commit to the goal. We pivoted to B2B Gamification and UX, as we had developed a strong team and acumen when it comes to design, UX, and technology. We got some early traction and revenue flowing in, and stabilized the business by working with clients like Pedigree, Fertin Pharma, School Cinema, Saffola, etc.

We built plug-and-play SaaS-based modules like Point Systems, Leaderboards, Streaks, Referral Programs, etc. We also received good interest from education companies who wanted to implement gamification to engage and retain students. By March 2024, we crossed the $50,000 ARR mark. We achieved $120,000 ARR in September 2024.

Last year (2024) around October, when we were discussing AI agents we came across this thought - "Soon, there will be multiple AI agents who are going to automate most of our tasks, then why are we still not there?" As we dug deeper, the problem was clear - apps don't talk to each other and something foundational needs to be built to solve this and hence started our new journey.

As of now, Snipe is running in the background mostly on autopilot and pays our sustenance bills while we focus on building antimattr.

I am the CEO, the business vision, design, and product guy. I am a product manager with a design superpower - I understand UX at its core and the "attention-to-detail" guy in the team. I did my undergrad at IIT-BHU (major - metallurgical engineering, minor - mathematics and computing).

Sirsho is our CTO, leading the entire software piece. He has worked on Android systems where he has built apps that have scaled to more than 100k users. He is also proficient in the cloud and backend. In our previous startup Snipe (gamification as a service) he managed the entire technology with just 1 full-stack engineer, a backend engineer, and a bunch of interns. His ultimate super-power is "figuring out" and "getting things done". He studied computer science engineering at KIIT.

Anshul is the marketing and distribution guy on the team with around 12 years of experience before starting up. He started his career in the advertising industry as a creative and media strategist. After his PGP from ISB in 2017, he worked at ABInBev driving brand awareness and event marketing for new consumer trials. Later, he joined McDonald's and led their digital business during COVID. Then he moved to a company called Sportskeeda on the sports publishing side to launch their US business (now contributes 60% of total revenue) after which he joined Turbostart where he met us.

But there are other factors that make us a great team - we ran the business frugally, cut down on personal expenses, and took a minimal but adequate salary, ensuring our team's salaries were given on time. Despite several challenges, we stuck together to build together and not quit. There were times we were not able to pay rent for three months due to cash flow problems however our landlord was supportive, he said "I understand, you guys are running a startup." These are people and stories that make us who we are today. Every support counts in our journey of "not giving up".

~ Sridipto (co-founder & CEO, antimattr); reach me at sri@lbtf.tech