In 2005, a software engineer in America watched a Shah Rukh Khan movie and walked out with a business plan.
Gaurav Mishra had followed the script for IIT graduates of his era: IIT Delhi in 1994, a PhD scholarship to SUNY Buffalo, a master’s in 1996, then a decade in American tech. Then came Swades.
“I got very inspired when I saw Shah Rukh Khan go to India to light a bulb.”
Baidu was beating Google in China, and India had no search engine of its own. In 2006, years before Flipkart made startups respectable, Gaurav and an IIT Delhi hostel friend started Guruji.com in Bengaluru, with Sequoia Capital among the backers.
Watch the full conversation with Gaurav Mishra here.
What Yahoo, Uber and Moj taught him
Gaurav spent four-plus years at Yahoo, where he launched Knowledge Graph entity search in 2013. A stint at Meta followed, then Relcy, a mobile search startup that Uber acquired. He stayed at Uber another four-plus years.
“Everybody has an opinion, but the guy with the data wins.”
Uber boiled that down to one number: how accurate is the arrival time on your screen? Behind it sat mapping data and hotel driveways that don’t match their street addresses. Cancellations and repeat rides rode on getting it right.
In October 2020, months after India banned TikTok, he joined ShareChat as SVP of product to build the AI behind Moj, its short-video app. Moj went from a few million daily users to 40 million at its peak. ShareChat’s existing 30 to 35 million users and creators solved the cold-start problem. For everyone else, his rule is to build unique supply first and let demand follow.
I asked why India never built its own answer to Reels and Shorts. His answer was distribution. Meta and Google already reach most Indian users and run thousands of experiments to find growth. He’d watched better algorithms move consumer numbers almost overnight, and in 2022 he went looking for a market where nobody had done that yet.
ProShort and the call you can lose
He found it in sales. Two reps report to the same manager. One hits quota, one doesn’t, and the explanation is a guess. Gaurav founded ProShort in 2022, headquartered in Cupertino with engineering in Bengaluru. He reckons it’s still only 10 to 15 percent of the way to solving the problem well.
“You cannot make a deal in one call, but you can lose a deal in one call.”
ProShort’s assistant, Aria, sits on Zoom or Google Meet like a teleprompter that knows the deal. It prompts the next question and supplies the answer on security reviews or a Salesforce integration. It’s the Uber lesson again: an accurate nudge at the right second. I pushed on the obvious tension, that more context should mean slower answers. His fix is curation, plus answers cached in advance for the questions each deal stage tends to raise.
At one demo, a CRO grew impatient with the ProShort team.
“After a while he said, ‘Why don’t you guys just shut up? I’ll just talk to Aria.’”
He talked to it for 15 minutes, then asked for it for his reps. Gaurav doesn’t expect AI to replace salespeople on half-million-dollar deals, because buyers want a human who’s accountable. The AI carries the details people forget under pressure.
Incumbents like Gong record calls and report afterwards. One ProShort customer told Gaurav he had used conversation intelligence “more as a surveillance tool.” Gaurav’s bet is that live help flips that: once reps trust the AI mid-call, they trust it with CRM updates and coaching too. Live assist is billed by the hour because streaming a call burns real compute, and he compares it to a sales engineer billing $100-plus an hour.
The vibe-coding objection
His toughest objection comes from buyers who say they’ll build it themselves with Claude Code or Cursor. One customer’s CRO did exactly that, vibe-coding deal-prediction dashboards in two days. Gaurav asked who would fix it once the whole company used it and it hallucinated.
“He said, ‘That’s not my problem.’ I asked, ‘So whose problem will it be?’ And he said, ‘I guess it’s your problem.’”
I argued that coding agents might handle that complexity within six months. Gaurav’s answer came down to accountability and runaway token bills. His rule: build what you sell, buy what helps you sell.
The money is moving his way. MarketsandMarkets sizes the AI agents market at $7.84 billion in 2025, heading to $52.62 billion by 2030. ProShort raised an $8 million seed in 2022 from investors including WestWave Capital and Neotribe Ventures. It has crossed $1 million in ARR, counts more than 50 customers, and in March 2026 won RateGain’s global revenue teams. The target is $10 million ARR by mid-2028.
Twenty years ago, Gaurav couldn’t wait for search to pay. This time, his company only works if the AI is right in the half second that matters.
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