Kabir Sen — Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Kaya Labs

About

Kabir Sen founded Kaya Labs in 2021 to build document-processing tools for Indian financial institutions. The company now works with a small number of banks and insurers and has deliberately stayed under sixty people.

Sen previously spent eight years as a product manager, latterly at Kavach Cloud, and has been openly critical of the assumption that Indian enterprise AI companies should be priced and staffed like their US equivalents. Kaya charges per processed document rather than per seat, a decision he has described as commercially inconvenient and strategically necessary.

He is unusual among founders in his cohort for having raised only one institutional round, and has said the company will not raise again until it has a second product with independent traction.

Leadership perspective

Why per-document pricing?

Because per-seat pricing asks a bank to predict how many people will use something they have not deployed. Every deal stalled at that question, so we removed the question.

Why stay small?

We have one product that works. Hiring ahead of the second one would just mean I spend my time managing the gap instead of closing it.

He is unusual among founders in his cohort for having raised only one institutional round, and has said the company will not raise again until it has a second product with independent traction.