Kumar Abhirup
AI engineer, founder, pre-seed investor.
About me
I’m the co-founder & CTO of Dench.com. I help companies build exceptional revenue engines.
I started my first company, Beam ⸺ The Substack for Texting, when I was 16. I spent two years building it before it was acquired.
At the age of 19, I worked alongside Naval Ravikant on Airchat. There I worked on web, analytics and audio. As described in Techcrunch, “Airchat wouldn’t be worth using if the transcriptions were sub-par, but it’s the best speech-to-text product I’ve ever used.”
In the Summer of 2024, on a 3 a.m. walk at Stanford, I partnered with my colleague of 4+ years ⸺ Mark Rachapoom, to create an Audio-Visual Comic Company called Merse. We were accepted into Y Combinator. We quickly scaled it to 25K monthly active readers featuring wide range of comics. For this work, we were featured in Business Insider.
In Late 2024, letters of recommendation from Garry Tan (CEO of Y Combinator), Guillermo Rauch (Founder & CEO of Vercel), Ryan Hoover (Founder of Product Hunt), Robert Wachen (Founder and COO of Etched), Serena Ge (Founder & CEO of Datacurve, the company that built the DeepSWE benchmark), helped me petition to the US government for an O-1 Extraordinary Ability visa.
In the beginning of 2026, I co-founded Dench.com, the company started as an offshoot of our viral OpenClaw fork: DenchClaw, it topped the HackerNews charts on Day 1 of launch, and it received over 1K GitHub stars within 48 hours.
I like taking on big problems by starting with something small and useful. Most of my time goes into building; sometimes, I write about it.
Angel Investing
I recently had the privilege of becoming a YC Scout. If you’re building a company and haven’t been through YC yet, I’d love to invest $10K–$25K.
I can also refer you to YC partners and mentor you through the application and interview process—from refining your pitch to practicing for your YC interview.
Tell me what you’re building: hey@kumareth.com.
Essays
I have a substack, but I compile my write-ups here.
Origin
I am a child of a single mother, grew up in a small town called Nashik in India. I started coding since I was 12, and I was raised by the internet during later half of 2010s (twitter). I did not go to a 4-year school. Despite growing up poor, serendipity and luck happened to me all the time and that helped me come to Silicon Valley, and I am immensely grateful.
Working with Sigil Wen was my gateway into the startup scene. I'd love to give back to this community, hit me up if you are ambitious, talented and new to the startup scene, would love to chat :)
Say hello
You can reach me at hey@kumareth.com or find me on X/Twitter.