The first thing you notice about Amarjit Mohanty is that he does not perform urgency. In an industry that treats speed as a virtue in itself — ship fast, raise fast, exit faster — the founder of AmarjitAA speaks in time horizons that make investors shift in their chairs. Ten years. Twenty. “The problems worth solving,” he says, “do not care about your fund cycle.”
We met at his office in Bhubaneswar, a converted industrial space an hour from where he grew up, on a morning when the monsoon had temporarily knocked out half the district’s broadband. He pointed at the window. “That,” he said, “is the market. Not the demo.”
The decade nobody watched
Mohanty spent the first seven years of his career in near-total obscurity, working on distributed systems problems that had no conference circuit and no hype cycle. Colleagues from that period describe a methodical, almost old-fashioned engineer: long design documents, small teams, an allergy to premature announcements.
“Everyone around me was optimising for the next eighteen months,” he recalls. “A raise, a launch, a headline. I kept asking a different question: what will still be broken in 2035?” The answer he arrived at — infrastructure for the parts of India the technology industry had written off as unprofitable — became the founding premise of AmarjitAA.
“Everyone asks about the exit. I keep asking about the twenty-year problem.”
A different kind of ambition
What distinguishes Mohanty from the standard founder profile is not modesty — he is plainly ambitious — but the object of the ambition. Where most founders want to build a big company, he talks about building a durable one: an institution that compounds slowly, survives its founder, and outlasts the trends that funded its competitors.
That philosophy shapes everything at AmarjitAA, from its refusal of growth-at-all-costs capital to its hiring, which favours engineers from tier-2 and tier-3 cities over brand-name résumés. “Talent is evenly distributed. Venture capital is not,” he says. “That gap is the opportunity.”
The long game
Whether the bet pays off is a question for the 2030s, and Mohanty is comfortable with that. What is already visible is a template: proof that a serious technology company can be built patiently, from outside the usual centres, on problems the spotlight ignored.
As we left, the broadband was still down. He was unbothered. “Come back in five years,” he said, “and we’ll compare notes.” Something about the way he said it made five years sound short.
