How middle-class Mumbai teen raised $2.6M for AI startup after dropping out of college

At just 19, Dhravya Shah, a teen from Mumbai, has raised $2.6 million (around Rs 23 crore) in seed funding for his AI startup, Supermemory, designed to supercharge the long-term memory of AI models.

Shah’s investors read like a who’s who of the tech world: Google AI chief Jeff Dean, DeepMind product manager Logan Kilpatrick, and execs from OpenAI, Meta, and Google, among others, according to TechCrunch.

Shah’s journey began with small consumer-focused bots and apps. One early success: Selling a bot that turned tweets into polished screenshots to social media tool Hypefury. That windfall funded a move to the US to study at Arizona State University—before he dropped out to focus on Supermemory.

“Being in a middle class family in Mumbai my parents were hesitant at first, but they eventually got me a laptop,” he revealed in a YouTube video last year. That laptop became his gateway to coding, creating bots, and eventually building Supermemory.

After moving to San Francisco, Shah challenged himself to build something new every week for 40 weeks. One of those experiments was an early version of Supermemory—then called Any Context—a simple tool that let users chat with their Twitter bookmarks.

Fast forward to today, and Supermemory has evolved into a powerful AI system that extracts memories from unstructured data—documents, chats, projects, emails—and helps apps understand the context behind that information. In short, it teaches AI to remember what it has learned and use that knowledge later.

“Our core strength is to extract insights from any kind of unstructured data and give the apps more context about users. As we work across multimodal data, our solution is suitable for all kinds of AI apps ranging from email clients to video editors,” Shah explained.

Supermemory’s seed round, $2.6M, was led by Susa Ventures, Browder Capital, and SF1.vc, with participation from top individual investors like Cloudflare’s Knecht, Jeff Dean, Logan Kilpatrick, and Sentry founder David Cramer. Clients include Cluely, AI video editor Montra, real estate startup Rets, and more.