From Zomato Delivery Rider to AI Founder: How Suraj Biswas Built Two AI Startups from a Small Town in West Bengal

In India's startup ecosystem, pedigree has long been treated as a prerequisite - the right college, the right city, the right connections. Suraj Biswas is a direct challenge to all of that.

The 28-year-old from Chakdaha, a small town in Nadia district of West Bengal, once delivered food on a bicycle for Zomato, earning between ₹1,000 and ₹1,500 a day. Today, he runs two artificial intelligence startups from Bengaluru - Assessli, an AI-powered personalised education platform, and Dots-in, an AI system designed to model individual human behaviour. He also runs a non-profit, Indots, supporting children who have lost both parents.

An Unlikely Starting Point

Biswas holds a B.Sc. in Genetics from the Gurunanak Institute of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology in Kolkata - a background that stands out in a startup world dominated by computer science graduates from IITs and NITs. He had originally wanted to pursue medicine, but circumstances steered him elsewhere.

After completing his degree, he joined Zomato as a delivery partner to make ends meet. Far from being a detour, he recalls that period not with shame but with pride. "My daily earning was between ₹1,000 and ₹1,500. I remember it clearly - not with shame, but with pride," he said. Those earnings quietly funded his growing interest in technology on the side.

The Idea That Started It All

The decision to build a startup was not a single eureka moment. "It wasn't one single moment - it was a slow accumulation of frustration and conviction," Biswas said. What he kept seeing, both in his own experience and around him, was how deeply broken personalised education was in India. Students were not failing because they lacked ability - they were failing because a standardised system treated every learner as identical.

That frustration became Assessli, an AI platform built to deliver genuinely personalised learning tools, adapting to the specific gaps and strengths of individual students rather than offering one-size-fits-all content.

The Second Bet: Modelling the Individual

His second venture, Dots-in, takes a fundamentally different approach to artificial intelligence itself. Rather than building systems that analyse large population datasets to draw broad conclusions, Dots-in focuses on modelling individual human behaviour - building AI that understands a specific person's patterns, decisions, and tendencies over time. It is an ambitious and technically complex bet, but one rooted in a clear philosophical conviction: that AI's real power lies not in understanding the crowd, but in understanding the person.

Both companies were founded in 2021, initially in West Bengal, before Biswas relocated to Bengaluru to access better talent, networks, and partnership opportunities - a move that mirrors the journey of many founders from smaller cities who eventually gravitate toward India's tech capital.

Beyond Business: The Indots Initiative

Following the loss of his father in early 2024, Biswas established Indots, a non-profit initiative dedicated to supporting children who have lost both parents. It reflects a thread that runs through everything he has built: a desire to serve communities and individuals that systems have historically overlooked or underserved.

A Message for the Next Generation

For founders who feel disqualified by where they come from or what they studied, Biswas has a direct message. "Stop waiting to feel ready. Readiness is a myth that keeps capable people comfortable and small. The gap between where you are and where you want to be is not filled by talent - it's filled by the willingness to feel stupid, lost, and afraid, and to keep going anyway."

He adds: "Don't confuse pedigree with potential. I came from a small town, studied at an unknown college, delivered food for money. None of that disqualified me. The world will try to tell you your starting point determines your ceiling. That is the biggest lie ever told to the most capable people on earth."