The Alchemist Founder: Devashish Fuloria's Journey from Materials Science to a $20M Geo-AI Acquisition | A GeoIQ Dossier
The definitive profile of Devashish Fuloria, the PhD scientist turned SaaS CEO of GeoIQ. Explore his journey, GeoIQ's $20M Lenskart acquisition, and their location AI.
"India is a data-poor country." For most entrepreneurs, this is a roadblock. For Devashish Fuloria, Co-founder and CEO of the location intelligence platform GeoIQ, it was the foundation of a multi-million dollar business. By building a powerful AI engine to make sense of the chaos of Indian data, he created a solution so critical to his clients' success that one of them, Lenskart, ultimately acquired the company. His journey from a PhD in Materials Science to a sports journalist and finally to a pioneering SaaS founder is a masterclass in how a non-linear path can forge the most resilient and innovative leaders.
This deep dive explores the story of Devashish and GeoIQ, leveraging proprietary insights from his exclusive interview on the Founder Thesis podcast with Akshay Datt.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
GeoIQ: A Company Snapshot
Before diving into the journey, here’s a look at GeoIQ by the numbers—a testament to its capital-efficient and high-impact approach.
Company: GeoIQ (Legally: Quantduo Technologies Private Limited)
Founded: 2018
Mission: To de-risk offline expansion for businesses using location intelligence.
Total Funding: A lean $3.35 million raised across several seed rounds.
Acquisition: Acquired by Lenskart in a strategic deal valued between $15 million and $20 million (June 2025).
Pre-Acquisition Valuation: Approximately $11.2 million (₹93.1 Cr) as of November 2023.
Revenue: Reported an operating revenue of $0.8 million (₹6.7 Cr) for the fiscal year ending March 2024.
Team Size: Operates with a lean team of approximately 32-44 employees.
Key Clients: Lenskart, Zepto, Hindustan Unilever (HUL), Swiggy, GIVA, Piramal Finance, and DMI Finance.
The GeoIQ Value Proposition: Replacing Gut-Feel with Data
At its core, GeoIQ answers a high-stakes question for businesses: "Where should I expand my physical presence?" For decades in India, this decision was made using intuition and inconsistent ground reports. GeoIQ replaced this "gut-feel" with a sophisticated, AI-driven platform.
"We are left to the mercy of what the ground team is telling us, and they would push their own agenda, so there's no centralized information."
The company's core technology is a powerful data engine that ingests, cleans, and synthesizes over 600 disparate data sources—including government census data, trusted public sources, and satellite imagery. This process generates highly granular 100m x 100m geospatial grids, analyzing over 2,000 attributes to provide street-level intelligence. This allows clients to get precise answers on site suitability, predict revenue for new locations, and conduct competitive analysis with an accuracy rate of 85-95%.
An Unconventional Founder's Journey
Devashish's path to founding a leading data science company was anything but typical. This eclectic journey equipped him with a rare combination of skills that became GeoIQ's strategic advantage.
From Deep Science to On-the-Ground Sales
With a PhD in Materials Science from Imperial College London and a BTech from IIT Kanpur, Devashish began his career not in a lab, but in sales and marketing at Tata Motors. This role gave him a firsthand understanding of the complexities of India's offline commercial landscape. A pivotal moment came when a mechanic in Rajkot asked a technical question about a product he was selling, and he had no answer.
"I said, okay. So what really did we do with the degree? I mean, we do not have this sort of practical knowledge about loads and real-world loading. So at that point, I started thinking about higher studies."
The Sportswriter Who Mastered Data Storytelling
After his PhD and a stint in engineering consulting in the UK, Devashish made another surprising pivot, joining ESPNcricinfo as a Sub-editor. For over three years, he honed the ability to interpret complex datasets and weave them into compelling narratives. This was not a detour; it was essential training in data storytelling, a skill crucial for translating thousands of geospatial data points into a simple, actionable recommendation for a retail CEO.
His first entrepreneurial venture, ZeLadder sports, was a direct result of this experience—an attempt to build a community for amateur sports using data. Though it didn't scale, it was his first taste of building a company from the ground up.
The Lenskart Symbiosis: The Ultimate B2B Playbook
The defining narrative of GeoIQ's success is its relationship with Lenskart. It is a masterclass in evolving a vendor relationship into a strategic partnership and, ultimately, a full acquisition.
Customer Validation: As a hyper-growth brand, Lenskart used GeoIQ to open over 1,400 new stores, achieving a 50% better return on invested capital and accelerating its store opening speed by a factor of five.
Strategic Investment: Impressed by the results, Lenskart led GeoIQ's $2.25 million seed round in May 2022, becoming the largest single external stakeholder with a 17.11% stake.
Full Acquisition: This deep partnership culminated in the acquisition in June 2025. The move vertically integrates a mission-critical technology for Lenskart ahead of its potential IPO, while giving GeoIQ a sustainable path to scale as an in-house "Center of Excellence."
The "Data-Poor" Advantage: Building a Moat in Chaos
Devashish’s most powerful insight was recognizing that India’s messy, unstructured, and incomplete data landscape was not a weakness to be overcome, but an opportunity to build a formidable competitive advantage.
"India is a data-poor country, so people collect their own data. But outside that, they don't really know much. So this was the holy grail that we were after."
GeoIQ’s core intellectual property is its data engine, built specifically to thrive in the chaos of the Indian data ecosystem. This creates a significant moat, as global competitors' models, often trained on the cleaner data environments of Western markets, cannot be easily adapted. By transforming data chaos into a valuable, proprietary asset, Devashish built a business whose very value lies in its unique ability to tame that complexity.
Listen now!
Other Ways to Listen:
Some of the things he shared:-
India is a data-poor country
Locational information on latitude and longitude
Monetization strategy
Paid satellite imagery
Click here to read the text version of the episode.
Additional readings:-
Know About GeoIQ, An ML-Based Location Intelligence Platform
How GeoIQ harnesses real-world data to build location-based intelligence
More innovations would be needed to make sense of data, and draw value from: GeoIQ
This location intelligence platform helps businesses make pinpointed decisions using bespoke AI
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Until the next founder's thesis📕,
Your host, AD