Mashgin

Origins

Back in the early 2010s, Mukul was hard at work helping Toyota determine how computers could use cameras to interpret and interact with the world. But Mukul had a problem - every day, he would go to get his lunch, and every day he’d spend most of that time (30-40 minutes) waiting in line in his corporate cafeteria. He decided to take a closer look at the issue and decided that computer vision could be the answer. After some initial testing, Mukul felt the idea was a big opportunity and flew to California to pitch his idea.There he reconnected with Abhinai, who was his classmate in the same dorm at IIT Delhi. He created an early demo that was so impressive that it convinced Abhinai to join him.Having worked in large companies and created some enormously successful projects, we were disheartened by the fact that when a project became successful, several people came in at the final stages to take credit. We decided to be founders and create a company that valued people’s contributions honestly and cut through the corporate bullshit.After successfully cold-calling head executives from some of the largest corporate cafeteria operators on the planet, we received many enthusiastic responses to our description of Mashgin’s Touchless Checkout System. He then set out to actually build it.After successfully building and demoing a Mashgin prototype to the YC team, Mashgin went from “project” to “company” over the course of the Winter 15 Batch.