Vasanth K.

Hi, I’m Vasanth.

I build whole products, end to end — two so far. I’d like to build the next one with a great team.

  • IIT Delhi
  • Chennai · open to relocating
  • 3 years building products
  • Nila · 4 months
  • Kaguya · 4,200+ sign-ups
See my work Get in touch
Vasanth smiling, with a still lake behind him
me, at a very still lake

Nila reads a month of bills, and an accountant checks each one against its source.

The Nila story

The real app on a real month of bills from my parents’ business: one 13-page PDF read into 13 invoices, each checked against its source, then rolled up into GSTR-1 workings.

Things I’ve built

Build log · Nila

Nila in 20 weeks: 732 commits, one person and a lot of coding agents.

Commits per week, May 25 – Oct 5, 2026. A commit count is a rough sense of activity. It doesn’t say how hard a week was.
  1. May 26

    “happy birthday, nila”

    My first commit. It started as a simple app for service businesses, for quotes, sites and work orders.

  2. Jun 21

    Pivoted to accountants

    Every service business I talked to worked differently. CA firms all file the same GST returns, so I figured their work would be standard enough to build once and sell to lots of firms. I started a fresh repo and brought the useful parts over.

  3. Jul 22

    Deleted the stuff I’d brought along

    I’d carried over a bunch of generic document, banking and workflow code from the old app. It helped me start fast, but the GST product wasn’t using it anymore, so I deleted it.

  4. Jul 30

    Caught the model quietly skipping invoices

    When the model read a whole PDF at once, it would sometimes just skip bills and still say it was done. So I switched to reading one invoice at a time.

  5. Aug 14

    Built a verifier, then deleted it

    I built a checker to catch wrong values. On 200 labelled claims it caught 1 of 17 mistakes, and sometimes made bad results look safer than they were. So I removed it.

  6. Aug 17

    Switched to vision models reading the page

    After weeks of fighting with OCR, I moved extraction to models that look at the bill directly.

  7. Aug 21

    Got Nila talking to Tally

    The tricky part was knowing whether an entry actually got saved. If you retry blindly, you can book the same sale twice.

  8. Sep

    Visited firms and changed the main output

    Accountants basically live in their Excel workings, so I made a reviewable workbook the main output. One accountant told me ours was harder to scan than his own, so I fixed that.

  9. Sep 23

    Moved the whole UI to React

    When I asked AI to design screens, especially tables, it did much better in React than in LiveView and needed far fewer rounds. I wasn’t selling much yet, so I spent that time making the product easier to use and good enough to record demos with.

  10. Sep 26

    Added invoicing for small businesses

    Small businesses could make invoices and quotations in Nila, and their CA would get the data directly.

  11. Oct 8

    Paused

    The product worked. But the firms didn’t have a hair-on-fire problem, and I had to persuade each one just to try it. Why I stopped →

Writing

Why I stopped building Nila The product worked and one firm was ready to try it. What I found out about the market, and what I’d do differently.Four rules for my next company Two products people used but didn’t urgently need taught me what I’ll do differently from day one.What CA firms told me when I walked in A month of visiting and calling accounting offices around Chennai, and why the hard part was finding the firms that needed it.The right number can still be the wrong answer What building Nila taught me about document boundaries, printed tax evidence, and a verifier I deleted after it failed a fair test.

About me

I studied Mechanical Engineering at IIT Delhi and taught myself to build software. After a quant internship at QI-CAP, I decided I’d rather build my own things than take another desk job, so in 2024 I started Kaguya, and in 2026 Nila. Most of what I know, from SQL and UI design to GST rules and Tally, I learned because one of those products needed it. I grew up living on books, and these days it’s mostly visual novels. I’m based in Chennai and happy to move.

Now

I paused Nila on October 8. The product worked, but accountants didn’t have a hair-on-fire problem, and every firm had to be persuaded just to try it. Now I’m looking at automated manufacturing, a foundry built around robotic assembly, and this time I’m starting with a cofounder.