The First Flight: Two Founders, One Nagpur Dream (How We Got to Top 10 Innovations of India)

Before last week, Archit had never been on a flight. Neither had I.

Ten days later, we were standing on a stage in Nagpur with the Education Minister of Maharashtra facilitating Nimitai as one of India's Top 10 Innovations.

This is the part of the founder story nobody writes.

Not the pitch decks. Not the investor meetings. Not the press releases. The part where two guys in their twenties check their boarding passes four times because they've never done this before, and quietly wonder if any of it is actually happening.

It is. It was. And I want to write it down before the memory blurs into something clean and edited.

The Waitlist We Never Thought We'd Get Off

It started in February 2026. Nilansh forwarded us a link to a Lemon Ideas form. Innopreneurs Season 12. A national innovation competition, part of something called the Viksit Bharat Conclave in Nagpur.

"Apply," he said. So we did.

We filled in the form in about forty minutes. Nimitai's value proposition, the problem we're solving, the market we're entering. Standard stuff. We submitted it and forgot about it, the way you forget about most things you apply for when you're deep in product cycles and customer conversations.

What we didn't know was that over 2,500 startups had applied. Two thousand five hundred forms, from every corner of India. EdTech. HealthTech. FinTech. AgriTech. Deep tech. Surface tech. Every flavor of founder with a slide deck and a dream.

We were just one form in a sea of forms.

The emails came in stages. First one said we'd made it past the initial screen. Then another said we were in the top 500. Then 100. Each time, we'd share the message in the team group, react with a fire emoji, and go back to whatever we were doing.

Then came the email that changed the tone.

"Congratulations. You're in the Top 10."

I remember reading it on my phone at around 11pm. I read it twice. Then I went to the kitchen, made chai, came back, read it a third time, and only then sent it to Archit and Nilansh. Archit replied with a single word: "Bhai."

Which is how we say everything that's too big to say with more words.

The Morning of the First Flight

Neither Archit nor I had ever been on a flight.

I want to say that casually, like it's no big deal, because we're trying to be professional. But it was kind of a big deal. We grew up in families where flights weren't how you traveled. You took trains. You took buses. You took whatever was affordable and available.

Nilansh had flown before and was reassuring in the way people are when they've done something you haven't. "You'll be fine. Just follow the signs." Easy for him to say.

Archit checked his boarding pass four times before we even got to the security queue. Not because he thought something was wrong — just because he needed to confirm the reality of it. Gate number. Seat number. Flight time. The small physical proof that this was happening.

I took a photo of us at the gate. Not for Instagram. Just for us. The two of us in the airport, dressed in half-decent clothes because we thought that's what you wore on flights, slightly uncomfortable in a way that would be funny later.

The flight itself was maybe an hour and a half. Delhi to Nagpur. I watched the city disappear below us and thought: we built something that got us onto a stage. We built something that got us on a plane.

That's not a small thought.

Welcome to Nagpur

When you land in Nagpur, there's a moment just outside the terminal. A rainbow arch — bright colors, big font — that says WELCOME TO NAGPUR.

It sounds like a small thing. A piece of airport signage. But when you're stepping off your first flight, in a city you've never visited, heading to an event where you're going to be called one of India's Top 10 Innovations — that arch hits different.

Nagpur has that energy. They call it the Orange City. Nitin Gadkari's city. The geographic center of India. A place that takes itself seriously.

Now, as of that week, also the city that felicitated Nimitai.

We checked into the hotel and Archit immediately spread the event schedule across the bed and started studying it like it was a board exam. Venue. Timing. Judges. Other startups. He had questions ready. He always does. That's who Archit is.

I unpacked the blazer I'd packed specifically for this trip, looked at it for a moment, and thought: tomorrow, this is what we wear to the pitch.

Day 1: The Formal Blazer, The 60-Second Pitch

The auditorium at Nagpur University is 103 years old and seats 400 people. I know that because I looked it up afterwards, but standing in it, you could feel the weight of it. High ceilings. Wood and stone. The kind of room where things have mattered for a very long time.

It was full.

Founders from across India. Investors. Officials. Students. Faculty. Press. All of them watching ten startups get sixty seconds each to explain why they deserved to be called an innovation.

Sixty seconds is nothing and everything. It's the distillation of months of work into a paragraph you've rehearsed so many times it stops feeling like language and starts feeling like muscle memory.

Archit handled the technical pitch. He always does — he's the one who built the product, who can explain the architecture without making it sound like a lecture. He knows where the interesting parts are. He knows which detail lands.

The judges included Dr. Vishesh Kasliwal, founder of Medysense Technologies, and Yaseen Shareef from Ind44 Capital. Both had the specific, patient sharpness of people who've heard a thousand pitches and remember the five that changed their minds.

When Dr. Vishesh Kasliwal asked Archit about our tech stack — about the specific decisions we made in how Nimitai processes live conversation context in real time — I watched something happen to Archit. He didn't just answer the question. He lit up.

I swear, in that moment, I felt him grow two inches taller.

After the pitch, we stepped off stage and exhaled. Not dramatically — just the long, slow exhale of people who have been holding their breath for two days and can now, finally, breathe.

Day 2: The Nimitai T-Shirts

Day 2 was different from Day 1 in the way that the second day of something important is always different. The formality was still there, but we'd survived the pitch. We knew what the room felt like now.

So we wore the T-shirts.

Nilansh had brought them. Branded Nimitai tees — clean design, the logo on the front, and on the back: a QR code. Every person who walked behind us, every conversation we drifted into and out of, every moment someone glanced in our direction — they could scan that code and land directly on nimitai.com.

It sounds like a gimmick but it's one of the most honest things we do. We sell to B2B sales teams. These events are full of exactly the kind of founders and operators who need what we've built. Every touchpoint matters. Every interaction is a potential conversation.

And honestly — people noticed. Multiple founders asked about the QR code. We explained it. They scanned it. Three conversations that day started because someone looked at the back of Archit's T-shirt.

That's the kind of growth I love. Not paid. Not manufactured. Just real human curiosity in a room full of people who are paying attention.

The Investor From Dubai

In between sessions on Day 2, I found myself talking to an investor who had flown in from Dubai for the event. He had a Singapore connection, a US connection, and a deep interest in what Indian startups were building for global markets.

We talked for maybe twenty minutes. About AI. About the B2B sales market. About what it means to build something in India that solves a problem being felt in New York and London and Singapore.

He asked smart questions. The kind that don't come from a template — they come from someone who has been paying attention to the space. He'd read things. He'd watched companies. He had views.

I kept thinking, as we spoke: this investor flew from Dubai to stand in a 103-year-old university auditorium in Nagpur to look for the next thing worth betting on. Founders crossed oceans to stand in this room. Something real is happening here.

He took a card. He scanned the QR code. He said he'd follow our journey.

I don't know where that conversation goes. But I know it started. And in early-stage startups, every conversation that starts is a thread you pull on.

The Facilitation

They called all ten teams onto the stage at the same time.

Ten startups. Ten sets of founders. All of us in a row, facing the auditorium, facing the cameras, facing the moment. Maharashtra Education Minister Shri Pankaj Bhoyar was at the podium. Officials flanked either side. The room was alive with that particular energy you only get when something is being made official — when the informal excitement of a competition becomes a formal recognition.

The camera flashes started before the formal part did. Press photographers. Event photographers. People in the audience with phones raised.

Archit's hands were shaking. Not visibly — you wouldn't have seen it from the audience. But I was standing next to him and I felt it. That particular vibration of controlled emotion that happens when something matters more than you expected it to, and you're trying very hard to look like you've been here before.

I was recording on my phone. Because I'm the operations guy. Someone has to record. That's my job at these things — to make sure the moment exists somewhere outside of our memories, which are unreliable and romantic and incomplete.

Nilansh — I'll say this carefully — was not crying. But there was a particular brightness to his eyes that the rest of us saw and chose not to comment on, because there are moments you protect by not naming them too loudly.

Shri Pankaj Bhoyar spoke about the importance of innovation in India. About what Viksit Bharat means in practice — not as a slogan but as a commitment. He spoke about the next generation of builders. And then the certificates were handed out, one by one, to each of the ten teams.

When it was Nimitai's turn, I caught Archit's eye for about half a second.

We didn't need to say anything.

The Certificate, The Flight Back, The Silence

We flew back to Delhi the next morning.

The certificate was in my backpack, rolled carefully inside a cardboard tube Archit had thought to bring. It felt heavier than it was. Or maybe I was just carrying it like it was heavy, which amounts to the same thing.

We sat together on the flight back — the three of us in adjacent seats — and for the first twenty minutes, nobody said anything. Not in an uncomfortable way. In the way that happens after something significant, when you're still inside it, when the processing hasn't quite caught up to the event.

The clouds were below us. The engine was doing that low steady hum that planes do when everything is working exactly as it should.

Then Archit turned to me and said, quietly:

"Bhai, this is actually real."

Which is the most complete thing he could have said.

When we got back, I unpacked the certificate and put it on the desk. Flat. Under a book, to keep the curl from the tube. Nilansh photographed it. Archit made tea.

And then we opened our laptops and went back to work.

Because that's what you do. The recognition is real, but the thing you built is more real, and the work is always more real. The certificate doesn't close deals. The product does.

What This Means for Nimitai

I've been careful in this post not to make the Innopreneurs recognition sound like an arrival. It isn't. We know that. Anyone who's been around startups long enough knows that recognition is a moment, not a destination.

But it does mean something. A few specific things.

It means that an independent panel of judges — judges who have seen thousands of startups, who have backed companies, who have built companies — looked at what we built and said: this is one of the ten most interesting innovations we've seen this season. That's validation of a specific, meaningful kind.

It means that Nimitai is no longer just a product with a waitlist. It's a product with a record. With a stage. With a moment in a 103-year-old university auditorium in Nagpur where a Minister of Maharashtra said our name out loud.

For our founding customers — the B2B SaaS sales teams using Nimitai right now — it means they backed a product that the broader market is starting to notice. That's not nothing.

For founders and operators reading this who haven't tried Nimitai yet: the pitch that won a Top 10 Innovation recognition is the same pitch you can see live in a 20-minute demo. The product that impressed a room full of investors is the same product available today at $149/seat/month.

What's next? More customers. Better product. More conversations with founders like the one from Dubai — and the thousands like him who are building things that require their sales teams to be sharp, fast, and well-coached.

We're building for them. We always were. The stage in Nagpur just made it louder.

If you want to understand the full picture of what Nimitai does, read our piece on why we built Nimitai. If you're ready to try it, the pricing page has everything you need.

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