A guild with innovation as its sole motive

Two things. We build our own products — AvA, an AI assistant platform with real-time voice and an open plugin API, and PathOr Meet, a free video meeting service with no accounts and no time limits. And we build software for other companies: AI and machine learning systems, full-stack web and mobile applications, and the cloud infrastructure underneath them.

Running both is a deliberate choice. Operating our own products means we answer for uptime, latency and the three-in-the-morning failure modes, not just for a handover. That experience is what clients are actually buying when they hire us.

PathOr was started in Gaya, Bihar, and stayed there. The prevailing assumption is that ambitious technology companies have to relocate to Bengaluru or Delhi to be taken seriously. We did not, and the work has not suffered for it.

Remote-first has been the default since 2019 rather than something adopted under duress. In practice that means written communication, decisions recorded rather than remembered, and progress visible without a status meeting — which is how we work with clients across time zones too.

The useful question is rarely "can we use AI here". It is "what does this person actually need to happen, and is a model the shortest path to it". Often it is not, and saying so is part of the job.

Where AI is the right tool, we are interested in the unglamorous part: getting it into production, keeping it there, and making its output legible to whoever has to act on it. A model that impresses in a demo and quietly gets switched off six weeks later has cost its owner money, not saved it.

PathOr was founded by Pranshu Ranjan, who serves as CEO and Chairman, alongside Srishti Rachna as Vice-Chairman. The team has since grown past fifteen people across engineering, AI research, infrastructure and design.

Before AvA there was Sam, a digital assistant for Windows and Android that found a large audience on YouTube and taught us where the hard parts of voice interfaces actually are. Sam is deprecated now and its capabilities live on in AvA. PathOr Leagues, an Android e-sports tournament platform, had a good run and has been discontinued. We would rather name those plainly than quietly delete them from the story.