Learned Coding At 11, Built A Rs 100-Crore Startup At 16 – Meet Indian-Origin Tech Prodigy Pranjali Awasthi

Pranjali Awasthi (Photo: X/@raidingAI)

New Delhi: At an age when most kids are deciding what hobbies to pick or which games to play, Pranjali Awasthi was already writing code. Born in India and raised partly in the United States, her journey into tech began unusually early.

With a computer engineer for a father and a deep curiosity for the digital world, she was just seven when she began learning programming languages at home. Coding was not homework, it was playtime.

By 11, her family had moved to Florida, where her passion found new ground. She immersed herself in competitive mathematics and computer science, sharpening skills that would eventually give rise to her own startup.

Now 16, Pranjali is the founder and CEO of Delv.AI, an artificial intelligence company designed to help researchers extract and summarise academic content more efficiently. The company, which she launched in 2022, is already making waves. It is valued at nearly Rs 100 crore (roughly $12 million), a staggering figure for someone who has not yet finished high school.

What sets Pranjali apart is not only her age. It’s her clarity of purpose and the way she has channelled her early exposure to technology into building tools that can change how people work with information.

Her startup was born out of a real-world problem – how time-consuming and difficult it is for researchers to sift through dense academic literature.

Pranjali’s solution – a platform powered by artificial intelligence that speeds up the process by generating clean and accurate summaries.

Her idea attracted attention from the startup world, and soon she was part of an accelerator program in Miami. There, she got the mentorship, resources and backing to take her vision further.

Now, the teen entrepreneur balances school and boardrooms, code and capital. And while her startup may still be young, it already speaks volumes about what can happen when curiosity, opportunity and courage come together early in life.

Pranjali’s story is drawing admiration globally and perhaps more importantly, showing young people everywhere that age does not define impact. Passion, paired with persistence, can take you from a bedroom computer screen to the founder’s seat of a multimillion-dollar company.