The success story of Pushpak Pujari, an IIT Delhi graduate and founder of San Francisco-based AI startup Harden, is marked by persistence, sacrifice and a willingness to try again after an initial setback. Pujari secured an All India Rank (AIR) of 183 in the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) and went on to study Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.
“I had lost my dad when I was in 10th grade, and I didn’t want to leave my family to move to Kota for coaching. Pujari did not secure his desired rank in his first attempt. Pujari has spoken about the personal circumstances surrounding his JEE preparation. So I stayed home and prepared mostly on my own,” he wrote. His mother played a significant role during his preparation. Pujari recalled how she would stay awake with him late into the night while he studied. Sometimes, she’d fall asleep right at the table while I studied,” he wrote. he felt it would not allow him to study the subject he wanted at the IIT he preferred While he considered it a good rank. “My first attempt, I ranked 2790th in India. It was a good rank, but not enough to study what I wanted at the IITs I wanted. So I decided to try one more time,” he wrote. He started college but continued preparing for JEE alongside his studies. This meant giving up several activities that his friends were participating in, including trips to Goa and college festivals. “I remember seeing her stay up night after night while I studied, sometimes dozing off at the table. Seeing how invested she was in me making it through kept me going,” he wrote. “Getting in was one of the proudest days of my life. But when I think about that year now, I don’t think about the rank first. I think about seeing my mom there with me, night after night, while I studied,” he wrote. After graduating from IIT Delhi, Pujari began his professional career at Sony in Japan. He later joined Amazon, where he spent around four years building products, including work related to Alexa. Pujari subsequently moved to the United States to pursue an MBA at The Wharton School. His academic profile also includes a Master of Arts in International Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. At Verkada, he worked on product roadmap, development, marketing and strategy for software, artificial intelligence and video-streaming products and features related to the company’s security camera business. His responsibilities also included new product research and development. At Verkada, he described his work as involving engineering and product solutions aimed at addressing challenges in video security technology. “We started with vision-language models. Realized it wasn’t the direction we wanted to bet on,” he wrote. “Then coding agents took off. We changed direction and started building Harden,” he wrote. The startup is focused on artificial intelligence and coding agents. He has invited people interested in building products and solving problems to get in touch with the company.
Because he did not want to leave his family, he lost his father when he was in Class 10 and decided against moving to Kota for coaching. He initially ranked 2,790th in India but decided to appear for the examination again while continuing his college studies. In his second attempt, he improved his rank to 183. “I remember my mom would stay up with me until 2 or 3 in the morning, when I was preparing for IIT. Pujari said his first JEE attempt resulted in an AIR of 2,790. In his second attempt, Pujari secured AIR 183 and was admitted to Electrical Engineering at IIT Delhi. Pujari said his engineering and product work affected more than 25 camera models deployed across more than 500,000 Verkada cameras in over 93 countries. In 2025, Pujari left Verkada and co-founded Harden, an AI startup, with a friend he said he had known for more than 25 years. Pujari’s journey, from preparing for JEE largely at home after losing his father in Class 10 to securing AIR 183 on his second attempt, studying at IIT Delhi, and eventually building an AI startup in the US, reflects the persistence he has repeatedly highlighted in his own account of his career.
“I sacrificed things a lot of people wouldn’t want to, like skipping Goa trips, college fests, and a lot of what my friends were doing that year,” he wrote. Pujari said his mother’s support continued to motivate him throughout the process. He has said that he was the only non-Japanese person on his floor and learned Japanese to perform his job. Pujari has said that he joined the company after cold-emailing its leadership team. “I led my team to develop a novel low-latency, bandwidth-efficient video streaming solution built on H.265 video encoding algorithm, which is compatible across various browsers (patent pending),” he wrote. He also said he worked on privacy features using real-time face detection and blurring algorithms, as well as computer vision features for edge devices. He said the company raised funding before having a product and later changed direction as coding agents gained traction. Pujari said Harden was scheduled to launch on Product Hunt and that the company was also hiring.
