Pushpak Pujari improved JEE rank to 183, co-founded Harden
Business
Pushpak Pujari, who once struggled with the JEE exam, has gone on to co-found an AI startup called Harden.
After improving his JEE rank from 2,790 to 183 on his second try, he's shown how persistence can really pay off in tech.
Pujari held leadership role at Verkada
Pujari lost his father in 10th grade but kept going with help from his mother, eventually earning an electrical engineering degree at IIT Delhi.
He worked at Sony in Japan and then Amazon on Alexa projects.
A bold cold email landed him a leadership role at Verkada, where he focused on AI video security.
In 2025, he co-founded Harden (originally working on vision-language models before switching gears to coding agents), and Harden raised $2 million in pre-seed funding.