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Slush 20U20

helsinki, november 16–19 2026. twenty people under twenty. flights and access on them.

coming soon. i'm going in november and i'll write the real version of this page when i'm back — what the room was like, who i met, and whether pitching it in person changed what i think i'm building.

i've been selected for slush 20 under 20: twenty people under twenty, from around the world, brought to helsinki for slush — the biggest startup event in europe. it's run by slush together with index ventures, anthropic and sifted. slush's own description is twenty young outliers with the potential to shake up the world, which is a lot to live up to and not a phrase i'd have picked for myself.

flights, accommodation and access are covered by them. nov 16–19, 2026.

Why this one matters to me

this is the second trip somebody else has paid for, and the first time i'll leave india. the first one was entrepreneurs first flying me to bengaluru — that was the first flight of my life, and i've written about what walking into that room did to my head on the front page.

for a long time the ceiling on what i could do was geography. i'm from a town of fewer opportunities than ambitions, and the whole constraint was that the rooms where things happen were somewhere else and getting to them cost money i didn't have. both of these trips were somebody deciding that shouldn't be the constraint. i don't take that lightly.

What i'm pitching

datak — the cad and engineering simulation data that ai labs need to train models on physical design, the benchmark i'm building on top of it, and the argument that whoever defines how these models get measured is best placed to build the one that wins. more on that on the front page.