Not often do we see a historian and a writer start a startup. How did the idea of NAAV AI come up?

Before branching into history full-time and completing my PhD in History and Music from the University of Queensland, I had done my Electronics Engineering and Masters in Mathematics from BITS Pilani and an MBA in Finance from SP Jain, Mumbai. I had also worked in the corporate sector in finance for about a decade. So, the world of tech or business has not been completely alien to me.

The genesis of NAAV AI was a very personal problem that plagues me and several other authors. Our books come out in English, and for them to bridge the language divide and make themselves available to the large cross-section of India—where the soul of Bharat actually resides in the Bharatiya Bhashas—is a herculean task. My own book sometimes takes several years to get translated even into Hindi!

I was discussing this problem with a very dear friend of mine, Sandeep Singh, who comes from a hardcore technology and business strategy background, having worked with several leading multinational firms for over 20 years leading their technology and business transformation initiatives. I wanted to know if we could find a technological solution to this very real problem. That is how, very serendipitously, NAAV AI came into existence about nine months ago with Sandeep and me as co-founders.

The word NAAV or “boat" is a metaphor for navigating across vocabularies using emergent AI technology. We got some very early support from OLA founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal and Asha Jadeja Motwani, the Silicon Valley-based angel investor, and that is how NAAV AI came about in January 2025. Our main goal and mission have been to create solutions around the translation of long-form content—which could be books, blogs, files, media organisations, and non-music audio content—from English to Indian languages and vice versa.

What’s the objective behind the NAAV initiative?

A recent survey said about 98 per cent of Internet users in India want to consume content in regional languages, and it is a fact that just 5–6 per cent of our country perhaps knows and consumes English. Currently, translations—especially for books—are such slow, laborious, and manual processes that take months and sometimes years to complete. Thus, the supply is never able to meet the demand.

Though with 22 official languages, several dialects, a burgeoning........

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