‘AI has opened up a generational opportunity for innovators to reimagine how software is built’ Abhishek Saikia of Kusho
Software development has now taken a turn with Artificial Intelligence (AI) that is making it possible to progress by developing more efficient and powerful models to tackle increasingly complex problems, leveraging large datasets and powerful computing resources.
Software development is one of the areas that propelled many start-ups to build foundations for their organization’s products and services with AI driven solutions are in great demand for robust solutions.
Abhishek Saikia and Sourabh Gawande are Cofounders who established ‘KushoAI as a Start Up’ that is focussing on AI-powered software testing. Their mission is to develop cutting-edge technology using proprietary models coupled with foundational LLMs to simulate an AI software development. This was done to disrupt how software is written in the coming decades.
(Abhishek Saikia and Sourabh Gawande are Cofounders who established ‘Kusho.AI)
Recently, Kusho secured a significant pre-seed funding round of $600,000, led by prominent venture capital firm Antler India.
FounderLabs recently sat down with Kusho founder Abhishek Saikia, who offered insights into his captivating entrepreneurial journey.
Kusho is spearheading a new direction in software development i.e. building AI agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) to ensure code testing throughout the development phase.
This aligns perfectly with the surging popularity of AI-Driven Development (AIDD) in the industry, poised to revolutionize software creation.
The investment secured by Kusho helps mark a major milestone for the young company and validates its potential to revolutionize the software development landscape.
Saikia emphasizes the importance of passion in navigating the entrepreneurial rollercoaster. “It’s a journey of highs and lows,” he says, “but working on something you love makes it all worthwhile.”
This passion extends to the team, early adopters, first customers, and initial investors who inspire and fuel the journey.
FounderLabs: Can you tell us more about Kusho’s innovative platform? What were the key factors that helped you secure funding for expansion?
Abhishek Saikia: Kusho is building AI agents that harness the power of LLMs (Large Language Models) to ensure code is tested during development and with every new release.
Kusho uses proprietary models coupled with foundational LLMs to simulate an AI software developer that can discover bugs in code with significantly greater accuracy and in a fraction of the time compared to a human software developer.
FounderLabs: What inspired the creation of Kusho? Did a specific experience at Flipkart or FalconX fuel this innovation?
Abhishek Saikia: My co-founder Sourabh and I founded Kusho in 2023 after having spent years in tech teams of different scales and domains.
Abhishek while speaking elaborated on Sourabh’s background who spearheaded the development of multiple systems at FalconX, a digital asset prime brokerage. I brought in my experience from my time in product management at Flipkart, where I built and launched software at scale.
With the recent advancements in the field of AI, we saw an opportunity to solve an age-old problem with cutting edge technology and decided to start Kusho.
FounderLabs: What challenges did you face and how did you overcome them?
Abhishek Saikia: While building initial versions of Kusho, inconsistencies in LLM responses proved to be a major challenge for us.
Ensuring accurate outputs for the end user while dealing with the inherent inconsistent nature of LLM responses needed us to build a tightly regulated agent framework. Additionally, hallucinations would often break the flow of data within our systems which we had to add multiple levels of fine-tuning to fix.
Coming to more non-technical challenges, educating our customer and user persona on how LLMs can help them get better at what they do took a fair amount of time and effort. Allowing initial users access to beta versions of Kusho helped them realise the value they could get very quickly.
FounderLabs: The developer tooling space is crowded. How does Kusho differentiate itself from existing solutions?
Abhishek Saikia: We think there is a massive opportunity for tech teams to take outcomes that software developers and software development teams want, and rethink the entire workflow from scratch. AI has opened up a generational opportunity for innovators to reimagine how software is built. This is rather difficult for incumbents to do given they already have users who are used to today’s workflows.
At Kusho, we are working towards a future where software developers harness their true potential and have the luxury of focusing on the creative aspects of their work – and leave the repetitive and mundane to machines.
FounderLabs: What are your key products, and how do they assist software development teams?
Abhishek Saikia: Today, Kusho helps engineering leaders get up and running with an entirely autonomous backend testing workflow that covers their entire codebase in hours.
This was previously unheard of and even attempting something like this would take months on end.
We’ve stitched together an AI agent that’s capable of understanding APIs deeply, testing scenarios that said API is likely to encounter in the real world, and unearthing bugs that would’ve skipped the developer’s attention.
FounderLabs: With your recent funding, what are your primary areas of focus for Kusho’s growth? How will this investment from Antler India help you expand in key areas?
Abhishek Saikia: With the recent capital infusion, we’re building out an incredibly talented founding team that’s set to power our growth as we scale across enterprises around the globe.
Key areas of focus include creating cutting edge tech, acquiring users, and expanding our customer base. Kusho’s as a Start-Up empowers AI software development.
FounderLabs: As a start up founder, what are your top advice for aspiring entrepreneurs?
Abhishek Saikia: While I’ve just started out and have been trying my best to learn the ropes – what’s worked well for both me and my co-founder is picking a problem we’ve faced personally and using a technology that is terribly exciting to us, to solve it.
There is something about dreaming up a future and building towards it that makes us show up every single day with the same enthusiasm that we started with.
I feel most other advice would be highly specific to each entrepreneur and as such is hard to apply broadly.
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