Rahul Maurya

Founder Story

Two companies, six and a half years apart.

TNine Innovations

Sep 2016 – Dec 2022

Built Crumblyy and CaptionPlus to over 5 million users worldwide.

How it started

TNine was started in 2016 by a few friends who were students at CIC, Delhi University. The name represents T for third floor, Nine for room 9, the classroom number where it all started. I joined within 5 months of operation: intern for a few months, then full-time co-founder.

Five TNine Innovations co-founders holding up letter cards spelling T-N-I-N-E at sunset
The founding team, spelling out the name.

We started as a service company building web and apps for clients. With that experience, we learned to build our own products and launched mobile apps that reached every corner of the globe: 5 million+ collective users, with at least one user from every country on the planet except three: North Korea, Vatican City, and Nauru.

The vision was to build a product studio, like Times Internet, with multiple in-house apps that cross-pollinate into one ecosystem. Safe to say we were ahead of our time.

What I learned running it

In a nutshell, I did almost everything that came my way, ranging from designing user interfaces to managing a cartel of property dealers while searching for office space.
  • The basics: started as a newbie UI design intern, and learned team building, idea generation, communicating through conflicting ideas, and building processes.
  • Functional design: went from being over-inspired by fancy Dribbble examples to designing functional interfaces that work in real life. Designed the UI and UX for every product TNine built.
  • Team management: learned to balance freedom with accountability across a team with different points of view, and hired and grew freshers into people who owned big projects on their own.
  • Content-led growth: grew products organically using ASO and SEO, reaching 5 million+ users with near-zero ad spend.
  • Bootstrapping: bootstrapped for six straight years, and won awards worth Rs. 35 lakh that funded product experiments.
  • No-shame attitude: fixed bathroom taps, unclogged water tanks, swept the office floor, and made tea for the team. Building a 0 to 1 organization is an MBA in itself.

Neusearch AI

2025 – 2026

Founded, built, and sold within 10 months.

The second attempt

Neusearch AI was my second journey as a builder, this time focused on AI search, GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), and agentic growth tools for brands. The insight was simple: as users moved from Google to AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity, brands had no clear way to understand or influence their visibility inside these new search engines.

I led product from 0 to 1: early discovery calls with D2C founders, designing workflows, and shipping scrappy prototypes. We experimented with agentic commerce tools like Shopify chatbots and product data optimization, helping brands improve how their catalog shows up, gets recommended, and converts across AI-native surfaces.

Rahul and his Neusearch AI co-founder Ankit at a table in their office
With co-founder Ankit at the Neusearch AI office.

How it ended

I built this closely with my co-founder Ankit and an angel investor on board, which meant tighter feedback loops, faster decisions, and very high ownership. Along the way, we pitched our product and vision to interested investors and closed an acquisition deal within 10 months of founding.

This phase stretched me as a product builder and made me more intentional about what to ship, how to measure it, and how I want to show up in the next phase of my career.