Akash Mamidi represents a new generation of founders who blend personal conviction with technical depth. After graduating from Stanford and returning to India, his own experience with the power of entertainment shaped his vision for what fan engagement could become. Today, he is leading one of the fastest-growing consumer-tech journeys in the country. In this conversation, Akash reflects on the inspiration, engineering philosophy, and design principles that guide his work.
Tell us about Oncemore.io, what inspired its creation, and what gap in fan engagement or entertainment technology were you looking to address?
Oncemore.io was born from a personal experience. When I returned to India after graduating from Stanford, my family was going through a difficult time, and movies, music, and sports became my source of relief, happiness, and hope. That made me realize how big a role entertainment plays in people’s lives. People’s favorite entertainment has a very special place in their lives; it is almost an extension of their identity, so they crave meaningful, memorable moments with the entertainment they love just like I do. But there’s no great place online that provides us with that. People are stuck with passively scrolling or watching so I wanted to build a platform that delivers those magical, memorable experiences for fans.
Oncemore.io is an AI-powered entertainment platform that partners with iconic IPs—from movies and sports teams to music artists—to create dedicated fan spaces on the platform. Think exclusive behind-the-scenes content, personalized digital comics, AI-driven character interactions, or collective quests where fans unlock hidden trailers together. We're building the "happiest place on earth" for fans, where engagement feels magical and meaningful.
Oncemore.io has been described as the fastest platform in history. What went into building the kind of infrastructure, scalability, and user experience architecture that could support such record-breaking performance?
Crossing 1 million registered users and 1.9 million visitors across 60+ countries in just 42 hours was a special moment for us. For context, ChatGPT, one of the fastest-growing platforms in history, took five days to reach the same milestone. It was special, but wasn’t too much of a surprise. We have been expecting big numbers, as we know how much love the fans have, and we deeply believe that fans crave and deserve more meaningful experiences with the entertainment they love.So we designed it assuming we'd get overwhelmed. We built for massive traffic with unpredictable spikes. We tested on old phones with spotty 3G connections because at scale, users have every kind of device and internet quality.
But we chose not to over-optimize. Fans come for magical, memorable experiences, not just fast load times. We balanced performance with richness so the experience feels special, not stripped down.
Looking ahead, we're designing for a future where generative AI enables entirely new types of fan experiences. Our platform is built so all of them can be hosted without worrying about flexibility, scalability, or security—handling today's scale while enabling tomorrow's possibilities.
From a systems standpoint, what innovations or engineering principles allowed Oncemore.io to handle massive concurrent engagement without compromising on speed or reliability?
We have a lot of engineering principles that we follow, way too many to state here. But to give you a few examples: We accept that it's not if something breaks, it's when, and how elegantly we handle it. We design with modularity and asynchronous processing so failures stay contained and the platform keeps moving. We build for graceful degradation so when traffic spikes, the core magical experience always works, even if non-essential features wait.At the end of the day, every engineering principle we follow serves one purpose: creating a platform that enables magic and keeps the spell alive.
How do you balance rapid user growth with maintaining system stability, data security, and engagement quality, especially when scaling globally?
We see scale and stability as two sides of the same goal. From the start, we designed Oncemore.io to grow safely and smoothly. Our infrastructure automatically adjusts to user demand, and we constantly monitor system performance to maintain speed and reliability.
For data security, we follow global best practices with secure authentication and compliance. Just as important, we make sure that quality does not drop as numbers grow. Every new feature is tested for both performance and fan experience before rollout.
In short, we scale responsibly. Growth is never at the cost of security or engagement quality.
What guiding philosophy helps your team move fast without breaking the product or user trust?
Trust is everything to us. It's one of the rare privileges users give platforms these days, and since users are the center of our universe, we treat that trust as sacred.
What makes it even more critical for us is that fans come to our platform carrying the love and trust they have for their favorite movies, sports teams, or artists. We're starting with high trust and even higher expectations to maintain it. So trust isn't just a value; it's a core principle that factors into every decision we make.
We maintain radical transparency with our users. We're clear about what we're building, how we use their data, and why we make certain choices. And we never compromise trust for anything else. Not for speed, not for growth, not for convenience.
For decisions that don't risk trust, we move fast using the reversible decisions principle. Most choices don't need to be perfect; they need to be quick and testable. We're constantly talking with users, learning from them, and testing with small cohorts before rolling things out broadly.
Our philosophy is simple when it comes to trust and speed: earn trust constantly, protect it fiercely, and let it be the foundation that allows us to move fast everywhere else.
Oncemore.io thrives on fan engagement. How do you use data, AI, and gamification to create emotionally resonant experiences for users?
First, AI is an emotional amplifier. AI doesn't replace the magic of great entertainment—it magnifies it. We can now create experiences that were impossible before: AI character interactions where fans have real conversations with their favorite personas, adaptable storylines that respond to choices, AI-generated world replicas that fans can explore. We can also personalize at a level that feels truly magical—putting users inside content, adjusting challenge difficulty to keep them engaged, tailoring narratives to their preferences. AI lets us make every fan feel like the experience was built just for them.
Second, AI is our creation engine. Through the AI orchestration layer we're building, think Lovable but for fan experiences, IP holders can create meaningful experiences and content quickly and economically, without needing technical expertise. This means more experiences, more variety, and faster iteration based on what fans actually want. Content creators shouldn't need to be engineers to bring their creative visions to life.
Together, these unlock something powerful: the ability to deliver magical, personalized experiences at a massive scale. Data tells us what fans care about, gamification gives structure to their journey, but AI is what makes each journey feel uniquely theirs.
What does it take to design a technology architecture that not only performs but also connects, emotionally and intuitively, with millions of fans?
The mistake most teams make is designing architecture in isolation, optimizing for technical metrics that users never experience. They celebrate sub-100ms response times without asking “does this actually make the user happier?”. The right approach is to start with the emotion you're trying to create and work backwards. Then build the architecture that delivers those feelings reliably, at scale.
How is Oncemore.io leveraging AI and interactive storytelling to transform fandom into a space for participation and co-creation rather than passive consumption?
AI is the unlock. The future of fandom isn't passive watching and scrolling. Fans are going to crave more meaning, more belonging, more participation, and more memorable and exciting experiences. But none of the existing platforms are designed for that future.
As we discussed, AI enables the creation of entirely new kinds of experiences that amplify emotion like never before. Fans can interact with AI characters, explore personalized storylines, and be part of the content itself. These aren't incremental improvements, they're fundamentally different ways of engaging with the entertainment you love.
We're also building an AI orchestration layer, as I mentioned earlier, to make it easy for IP holders to create these experiences. And down the road, we'll enable fans to co-create in different ways too, shaping and creating experiences for each other.
The transformation is from being an audience to being a member of the fandom family. It's about belonging, not just participation. AI is what makes that shift possible at scale.
How do you see technologies like AR/VR, AI-driven storytelling, and digital collectibles shaping the next phase of entertainment and fandom?
Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Blockchain have been dismissed as buzzwords searching for a problem. But entertainment and fan engagement is where these technologies find their killer application.
Even in our first digital experience, participants received digital collectible cards, and I saw social media accounts organically asking people to share them for a chance to win prizes. That showed me what's inevitable: NFTs for collectibles and rewards, soulbound tokens for badges of fandom and privileges, stablecoins for global payments and micro-transactions.
And coming to VR, how could fans not want to explore their favorite fictional worlds?
The AI wave, VR wave, AR wave, blockchain wave are all going to profoundly impact entertainment and fan experiences. But it's always about the user. Technology is just the tool. We're building for what fans want, and letting the best technologies serve that vision.
How has India’s growing developer ecosystem and creative economy empowered you to build a globally competitive consumer tech brand from here?
India has something unique: a massive, passionate fan base that's mobile-first, diverse in devices and connectivity, and incredibly engaged with their entertainment. Building here forced us to solve the hardest problems first.When you build for India's scale, diversity, and constraints, you accidentally build for the world. Our partnership with "They Call Him OG" brought users from 60 countries!
India also has world-class engineering talent and a creative economy that understands storytelling at scale. The fusion of technical excellence and creative energy here is unmatched. I believe India is the best launch pad for our rocketship to deliver happiness to billions across the globe.