Mukesh Bansal Built Myntra, Then Cult.fit — Now He's Betting India's AI Won't Just Be Text

Mukesh Bansal is one of the few Indian entrepreneurs with two genuinely category-defining consumer businesses behind him — he co-founded Myntra, the fashion e-commerce platform later acquired by Flipkart, and then built Cult.fit (Cure.fit) into one of India's largest fitness and wellness brands. In 2024, rather than pursue another consumer play, he took a sharp turn into enterprise infrastructure, co-founding Nurix AI with Abhishek Asawa and incubating it inside his own startup studio, Meraki Labs.

A Different Kind of Bet: Voice Over Text

Nurix's founding thesis runs against the grain of where most enterprise AI startups have focused. Bansal has argued that most AI tools today generate conversations largely over text, but that isn't how meaningful human-to-human interactions actually happen — people need to talk to make decisions and feel heard, not exchange messages. That conviction shaped NuPlay, Nurix's flagship product: a voice-first platform built on proprietary low-latency conversational technology, designed to handle natural dialogue, including interruptions, with what the company claims is 99 percent accuracy across enterprise use cases like sales and customer support.

The bet paid off quickly with capital. Nurix raised $27.5 million in a September 2024 seed-cum-Series A round co-led by Accel and General Catalyst, with Prosus also participating — a substantial early round for a company barely months old, built on Bansal's track record more than a finished product.

Landing Real Enterprise Clients Fast

Rather than chase abstract AI hype, Nurix moved quickly to sign recognisable clients, including super.money, Myntra, Cult.fit and Aditya Birla Capital — a client list that notably includes two of Bansal's own earlier companies, giving Nurix a built-in proving ground with businesses that already trusted his judgment on customer experience.

The Acquisition That Signals the Next Phase

In July 2026, Nurix AI acquired Verloop.io, an established enterprise conversational AI company founded in 2015 that had built a chat automation platform handling more than 20 million customer interactions every month. The deal, terms undisclosed, was explicitly about combining voice and chat under a single platform — Bansal framed it as recognising that AI's value in the enterprise will be measured by real business outcomes, not pilots, and that enterprises don't struggle to understand AI's possibilities so much as they struggle to deploy it reliably at scale. Verloop's founder, Gaurav Singh, joined Nurix's leadership team to help shape product strategy and enterprise go-to-market — a rare case of an acquired founder taking on a senior building role rather than simply exiting.

Riding a Genuinely Large Wave

Bansal's timing lines up with a category expanding fast: enterprise AI is projected to grow from $11 billion in 2025 to $71 billion by 2030, according to Google and Inc42's Bharat AI Startups Report — a roughly 6.5x surge that explains why a founder with Bansal's consumer-tech pedigree chose to build his third company squarely in enterprise infrastructure rather than another consumer app.

Why It Matters for Startup Stories

Bansal's move from Myntra and Cult.fit into Nurix is a useful data point on where India's most experienced consumer-tech builders are now placing their bets: not on the next big app, but on the infrastructure layer that lets other companies — including their own former ventures — actually deploy AI in customer-facing roles. For a founder who built his reputation on understanding what Indian consumers want, betting that they specifically want to talk rather than type is a distinctly personal thesis, not just a market read.

Startup Stories

At www.elevatexstudios.com / ElevateX Studios, Startup Stories, part of our Startup Spotlight coverage, tracks the founders and companies building India's next generation of category-defining businesses.