How A 20-Year-Old UCLA Student Arjun Vad Is Taking Frontier Tech From San Francisco To India

New technology is easier to build than ever, but building it is only half the job. A product that works well in San Francisco can still stall in a Gujarat factory or with developers in Bangalore, for reasons that have little to do with the technology itself. “Getting it into the hands of the people and markets that need it remains extraordinarily hard,” says Arjun Vad, co-founder of Agencity.

Agencity was built to close that gap. It helps frontier-technology companies enter new markets, and it does more than study a market or make introductions. Its team finds the buyers, shapes the offer, runs the deployment and works to turn a first customer into repeat business. Agencity charges fees for this work and, where its work creates value, takes an ownership stake.

Arjun co-founded Agencity with Amitesh Das, and the company was incorporated in India in September 2025. It works through operators in San Francisco, Dubai, Lagos, Barcelona and Bangalore, and has led OpenSwarm’s entry into India and an industrial-AI pilot in Gujarat. Justin Hardin, co-founder of Climatebase, is joining as Chief Operating Officer.

Arjun came to the problem by building things himself. He studies computational mathematics at UCLA after starting at UC San Diego. His earlier work spans robotics, language-model research and Crowdflo, an initiative that gave about 5,000 Indian students access to educational and extracurricular opportunities. He was also on the founding team  ̰ ̰of an a16z-backed startup and co-founded a healthtech company backed by the Indian government. Both ventures, he says, taught him the same lesson: building technology keeps getting easier, but getting people to adopt it does not.

Arjun does not see his age as a drawback. “Being young has been an advantage rather than an obstacle, because I carry no inherited assumptions about how things are supposed to be done,” he says. “Founders and investors judge us by what we deliver.”

Agencity itself began as something smaller. Its first version connected students with jobs at startups, including YC-backed companies, and reached about 7,000 users and 4 million organic impressions without paid marketing. Building that audience and matching people with opportunities shaped the market-entry business it has since become.

Seeing a Platform Where Others Saw Supplements

One of Arjun’s early bets was on Khushang Hirpara, the Indian founder of CLD-9. The company uses robotics to make personalised supplement formulations and reports having shipped more than 24,000 of them. “When I first met Khushang Hirpara, many people saw CLD-9 as a supplements company,” Arjun says. “I saw robotics capable of manufacturing a different formulation for every individual, which is a platform for personalised medicine.”

He invested at an $8 million valuation cap, before Antler and Boost VC came in. CLD-9 is now raising at a $50 million valuation.

His role went well beyond the cheque. He built and ran a 30-person growth team for CLD-9 across the US and India, coordinated its seed round and worked on its India market entry. “Operating inside a company teaches you what no presentation can: how buyers actually respond, what implementation truly costs, and whether a product creates enough value to sustain a relationship,” he says.

That experience now shapes how he picks companies. He looks for technology that already works and a founder who understands that “the next battle is not technical.” “When we can see a route to customers that others cannot, we invest with conviction rather than waiting for consensus,” he says. Arjun has also backed Raisi.ai, Breethr and Mussel Polymers, an advanced-materials company that has since closed a $10 million Series A.

Taking Responsibility for the Outcome

Arjun contrasts Agencity with the help companies usually get when they enter a new market. “Consultancies assess a market and leave,” he says. “Most investors provide capital and introductions, then step back.” Agencity, he says, takes responsibility for the outcome and does the commercial work itself.

The model also shapes how Agencity makes money. Fees pay for the day-to-day work, while ownership stakes give it a share of the long-term value it helps create. Each market it opens, Arjun argues, makes the next entry faster and cheaper, because every new launch draws on what the company has already learned.

“For too long, the geography of invention has dictated the geography of opportunity,” Arjun says. “We built a company designed to change that, and to grow stronger each time it does.”

From a Bangalore Build Jam to a Gujarat Factory Floor

Two projects show the range of that work. In July 2026, Agencity led the India entry of OpenSwarm, a developer-AI company backed by Entrepreneurs First. The centrepiece was a build jam in Bangalore, run with Polaris School of Technology, where participants built projects using OpenSwarm’s tools. It drew 1,200 participants and 151 verified project submissions. About 25 campus ambassadors across Indian engineering colleges help Agencity keep such developer communities engaged.

In Gujarat, Agencity brought together a US computer-vision company, a deployment partner from Rajkot and a local manufacturer for a pilot on a steel-cutting floor. The system tracks how much of the time the machines are actually running. Through its network in the state, more than 80 other factories have been shortlisted as possible next customers. Agencity is also working to bring Mussel Polymers’ specialised adhesives to Indian construction and real-estate firms, for jobs such as underwater pool and structural repair.

The two settings could hardly be further apart, but Arjun says the lesson was the same. “Procurement, pricing, implementation and trust work differently in a Gujarat factory than in a San Francisco office,” he says. In both cases, he adds, the project worked because someone took full responsibility for the buyer, the delivery and the relationship afterwards.

The People Behind Agencity

“Exceptional people join work that is already real,” Arjun says of how Agencity built its team. Co-founder Amitesh Das leads distribution and India operations from Bangalore and has close ties with the country’s operator and family-office networks. He has run teams of more than 100 people and co-founded OFFSIDE, a football league backed by Red Bull.

Justin Hardin, the incoming Chief Operating Officer, co-founded Climatebase, which connects more than a million people a year with climate careers. Before that, he was a senior engineer at Slack. He also co-founded SF Climate Week and was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Beyond the core team, Arjun and Amitesh can turn to a community of about 100 operators, investors and family-office principals.

Where Agencity Goes Next

Outside Agencity, Arjun judges startup pitch nights in San Francisco, mentors students at Draper University and speaks on panels hosted by Raisi. His content on AI, robotics and company building draws about 500,000 views a month. Next year, he says, Agencity will host SF Climate Week.

Over the coming year, Agencity plans to grow across India, the Gulf, Africa and Europe. The idea is to take many companies into the same markets, so that each new launch builds on what earlier ones have taught.

“Personally, I want to help ensure that where a technology is invented no longer decides who benefits from it,” Arjun says. Judging and mentoring are part of that, he adds, “because the next generation of founders deserves the same access that changed the course of my own work.”

For Agencity, that work happens far from where technology is invented, at a build jam in Bangalore or on a factory floor in Gujarat, where a product built for one market starts working in another.