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Founding CTO · Technical Product Manager

I build AI products and lead what ships.

Balaji G — technical product leader and hands-on builder. Founding CTO of InzightED and, today, technical product manager at Ahoum, steering its AI product suite. I take products from architecture to roadmap — building the hard parts and leading what ships.

6
shipped builds
0→1
idea to product
AI-native
grounded, not hyped

I’m Bala — I build the kind of software I wished existed, then sharpen it until it ships.

Balaji G — Bala. I’m the founding CTO of InzightED and, today, technical product manager at Ahoum — steering a monetised AI companion and its expert-chat suite. Under build with bala I also ship my own systems: a real-time logistics cockpit, an on-device Android training coach, a knowledge-benchmark for LLM self-awareness, and more. I build the hard parts and lead the product around them.

The stack follows the problem: Django and FastAPI on the backend, Kotlin and Compose on mobile, React and Svelte on the front, Astro for the web. Every AI integration is deliberate — budgeted, fallback-aware, and honest about what the model does not know.

  • 01

    Grounded over hyped

    AI is a tool, not a tagline. Every model call earns its place with budgets, fallbacks and honest evaluation — including knowing when a system should say "I don't know."

  • 02

    Build it and lead it

    I own both sides — the architecture and code, and the product direction and roadmap around it. The person making the technical calls is the one setting the direction, so nothing gets lost in translation.

  • 03

    Built to run offline

    On-device inference, local-first data, graceful degradation. Software that keeps working when the network and the cloud do not.

Selected builds, one through-line:
intelligence that ships.

From real-time logistics to on-device vision and benchmark research — each project is a complete system, designed and built end to end.

02 Co-founder & CTO

AI that explains why a student got the marks

  • +45% (H-RAG) Insight accuracy
  • 94.2% → 98.0% OCR
  • −30% System load
  • 10 Clients

Founding CTO of ZAi-Fi's InzightED — a hierarchical-RAG NEET evaluator that goes beyond marks to surface the concept gaps behind a student's score. I set the technical and product direction: Neo4j knowledge graph, an LLM-as-evaluator pipeline, and Mistral/Textract OCR intelligence, orchestrated via Django and Celery — and the roadmap and hiring bar around it.

  • Owned technical + product direction as founding CTO — architecture, roadmap and hiring bar
  • Architected a hierarchical-RAG NEET evaluator that goes beyond marks to concept gaps
  • Neo4j concept-gap knowledge graph + LLM-as-evaluator pipeline; OCR accuracy to 98%
  • Still a co-founder; stepped back from day-to-day in late 2025 for the MBA

⚑ Founding idea was the CEO's; the technical architecture and product direction are Bala's.

  • Django
  • Celery
  • Neo4j
  • PostgreSQL
  • H-RAG
  • Mistral OCR
Founding CTO — product & architecture Edtech / AI evaluation
03 Deployed

eCAP + IIM Campus Portals

2026

Software that runs an IIM, built from a wheelchair

  • 2000+ students Reach
  • electives + election + sports portals Systems
  • ecap.iimbg.ac.in Deployed

Lead developer on the IT Committee at IIM Bangalore, building and deploying the eCAP elective Course Allocation Portal and a suite of campus systems — encrypted elections, sports portals, and admin dashboards — serving the full student body.

  • eCAP elective Course Allocation Portal deployed at ecap.iimbg.ac.in
  • SSO + RBAC encrypted election system
  • Sports + admin portals with live stats and audit tracking
  • React
  • Django
  • PostgreSQL
  • SSO/RBAC
IT Committee — lead developer Campus systems
04 Open source

GlassBench

2026

Benchmarking when models should say "I don't know"

  • 96 real multi-session Conversations
  • 4 (answerable/stale/contradiction/false-premise) Splits
  • Confidently-Wrong Rate Signal
  • Open source License

An open, frozen-design benchmark for LLM memory systems that measures calibration, not just accuracy. Where other benchmarks ask "did it retrieve the right fact?", GlassBench asks "when it is wrong, does it admit it?" — introducing the Confidently-Wrong Rate and a composite Glass Score across answerable, stale, contradiction and false-premise splits drawn from real multi-session conversations.

  • Frozen pre-registration committed before any system is scored
  • Confidently-Wrong Rate isolates the failures that hurt in production
  • Four task splits across 96 real multi-session conversations
  • Deterministic open scorer that defeats degenerate strategies
  • Python
  • NumPy
  • pytest
  • HF Datasets
  • LongMemEval
Research, design, scorer AI research / Evaluation
05 In development

SupplyLens

2026

Logistics intelligence cockpit

  • 4 (fleet · warehouse · freight · disruption) Live data domains
  • cost-gated Gemini, structured output AI gateway
  • Redis pub/sub + SSE Realtime

An AI-powered platform that folds real-time fleet tracking, warehouse ops, freight-market intelligence and disruption detection into a single situational-awareness cockpit. A modular Django core streams live data through Redis pub/sub and SSE into a React frontend, with a Gemini-backed AI gateway synthesising narratives and alerts under strict budget controls.

  • Module-agnostic real-time pipeline over Redis pub/sub + Django Channels SSE
  • Pluggable app modules wired through a central bus — no cross-module imports
  • Cost-aware AI gateway with structured Gemini output and budget gating
  • Multi-tenant isolation and HMAC-signed webhooks from day one
  • Django 5
  • React 18
  • Celery
  • Redis
  • PostgreSQL
  • Gemini
Architecture, backend, AI gateway Logistics / B2B SaaS
06 Working build

SlideAlchemy

2026

Raw resources to finished decks

  • 6 (PDF/DOCX/slides/img/YouTube/web) Ingest formats
  • 12 questions Interview
  • 7 sections, self-improving Prompt engine

A desktop app that ingests PDFs, DOCX, slides, images, YouTube transcripts and web pages, then generates polished presentation decks through Google NotebookLM. A twelve-question interview refines audience and visual style; a seven-section prompt engine drives generation; and a feedback loop banks high-rated prompt fragments so future decks get sharper over time.

  • Multi-format ingestion with automatic research gap-filling
  • Interactive 12-question interview with learned defaults
  • Seven-section prompt engine with visual directives and quality rules
  • Reinforcement loop seeds a success-pattern DB from rated decks
  • Svelte 5
  • Tauri 2
  • Rust
  • FastAPI
  • SQLite
  • NotebookLM
Full build — Tauri / Svelte / FastAPI Productivity / GenAI
07 Shipping

ExerciseChecker

2026

On-device form coach, gamified

  • 100% offline, 0 network perms On-device
  • 5 with form state machines Exercises
  • ML Kit pose, real-time rep counting Engine

A fully offline Android app that reads your exercise form in real time using on-device ML Kit pose detection — no internet permission, no cloud uploads. Per-exercise state machines count reps and flag form across squats, push-ups, lunges, planks and jumping jacks, all wrapped in a Solo-Leveling-style "System" of XP ranks, daily quests and achievements.

  • On-device pose detection with zero network permission
  • Debounced form rules + rep-counting state machines per exercise
  • XP ranks (E→S), quests, achievements and a muscle-balance radar
  • Schema-versioned JSON/CSV backups with no storage permission
  • Kotlin
  • Jetpack Compose
  • ML Kit
  • CameraX
  • Hilt
  • Room
Full build — Kotlin / Compose Mobile / Computer vision
08 Working build

Insta Reels → Obsidian

2025

Reels into a searchable second brain

  • fully local vector store Pipeline
  • provider-swappable, graceful degrade RAG
  • searchable Obsidian vault Output

A FastAPI service that captures Instagram reels shared to a burner account and turns them into a searchable Obsidian vault. It fetches metadata, auto-tags with an LLM, optionally transcribes audio, and embeds everything into a local vector store — then answers natural-language questions across your entire reel library. Every stage is provider-swappable and degrades gracefully when a model is offline.

  • Hands-off reel ingestion via private-API polling
  • Composable RAG: transcription, vision, embedding all provider-swappable
  • LLM auto-tagging into Obsidian markdown with YAML frontmatter
  • Graceful degradation and automatic retry for failed fetches

⚑ Uses a burner account; Instagram ToS risk is acknowledged in the project.

  • FastAPI
  • SQLite
  • yt-dlp
  • Whisper
  • Ollama
  • Chrome MV3
Full build — Python / RAG Knowledge tooling / RAG
09 Phase 1 — QA

ShutterDock

2026

Your phone as a camera FTP dock

  • Wi-Fi/USB-C/hotspot live tether Transport
  • 3 (Drive/Dropbox/Lightroom) Upload targets
  • embedded Apache MINA FTP Server

An Android app that turns your phone into an FTP server for a Canon EOS R6 (or any FTP-capable camera). Shoot over Wi-Fi, USB-C or a hotspot and watch frames land live in a gallery grid. Swipe to star, reject or skip, then auto-upload keepers to Google Drive, Dropbox or Lightroom — all driven by an embedded Apache MINA server and a WorkManager upload queue.

  • Embedded MINA FTP server in a session-aware foreground service
  • Live gallery grid with swipe review (star / reject / skip)
  • Multi-cloud auto-upload: Drive, Dropbox, Lightroom
  • Wi-Fi, LocalOnlyHotspot and USB-RNDIS network detection
  • Kotlin 2.0
  • Jetpack Compose
  • Apache MINA
  • WorkManager
  • Room
Full build — Kotlin / Compose Mobile / Photography
10 Backend intern

MeetMyMentor

2024

Backend that carried 90k+ monthly interactions

  • 90,000+ Monthly interactions
  • −35% Fetch latency
  • +50% UX efficiency

Backend Developer Intern at MeetMyMentor — a mentorship platform serving tens of thousands of monthly interactions. Built scalable REST APIs, optimised MongoDB schemas for lower latency, and integrated a React dashboard that measurably improved UX efficiency.

  • Built scalable REST APIs serving 90k+ monthly interactions
  • Optimised MongoDB schemas for −35% fetch latency
  • Integrated a React dashboard for +50% UX efficiency
  • Node.js
  • Express
  • MongoDB
  • Mongoose
  • React
Backend Developer Intern Mentorship platform
11 Published

Edge CV that protects crops, humanely

  • 92.4% @ 60 FPS mAP
  • 1500+ images Training set
  • EAI IoT Journal Published

A computer vision capstone deploying YOLOv5 to a Jetson Nano via ONNX for real-time rhesus macaque detection at 60 FPS, paired with ultrasonic deterrence validated above 90% — a humane, low-cost crop-protection system published in the EAI IoT Journal.

  • YOLOv5 detector deployed to Jetson Nano via ONNX at 60 FPS
  • Ultrasonic deterrence validated >90%
  • Published in EAI IoT Journal (DOI 10.4108/eetiot.4809)
  • YOLOv5
  • Jetson Nano
  • ONNX
  • Ultrasonic
CV capstone — model + edge Computer vision / Edge AI
Neosophical Labs

Technical Product Manager

2026–Present · Goa, India

  • Lead the Ahoum suite from roadmap to release — Talk-to-Expert, SBF and Expert chat
  • Talk-to-Expert: 316 LLM personas with live Razorpay monetisation
  • Designed 100→10k concurrent WebSocket scaling (Aurora Serverless v2, Fargate)
ZAi-Fi

Co-founder & CTO

2025–Present · Chennai, India

  • Hierarchical-RAG evaluator + Neo4j concept-gap graph + LLM-as-evaluator
  • +45% insight accuracy, OCR 94.2%→98.0%, −30% system load
  • Served 10 clients
MeetMyMentor

Backend Developer Intern

2024–2024 · Remote

  • Scalable REST APIs (Node/Express/MongoDB)
  • −35% fetch latency via schema optimisation

Education

IIM Bodh Gaya MBA — Digital Business Management 2025–2027
VIT Chennai B.Tech — Computer Science & Engineering 2021–2025
Languages
  • Python
  • TypeScript
  • Kotlin
  • Rust
  • Bash
Backend
  • Django
  • FastAPI
  • Node / Express
  • Celery
  • Redis
  • Centrifugo
Frontend / Mobile
  • React / Next.js
  • Svelte / Tauri
  • Astro
  • Jetpack Compose
  • Capacitor
Data
  • PostgreSQL
  • Neo4j
  • MongoDB
  • Aurora / Neon
  • SQLite
Cloud / Infra
  • AWS (ECS · Fargate · RDS · ALB)
  • Docker
  • Coolify
  • nginx
AI / LLM
  • Gemini · OpenAI · Anthropic · Groq
  • RAG / H-RAG
  • Multi-agent
  • Voice agents (LiveKit · Deepgram · ElevenLabs)
  • DSPy

Have something that
should exist?

I take on a small number of builds at a time — products, prototypes and the occasional thorny research problem. If it's ambitious and AI-shaped, it's probably a fit.

Reach out directly — details coming soon.