Vibhum Aggarwal

student at BITS Goa. i build things.

i'm vibhum. i build AI products and do research — right now that's hunch, an AI that texts you first, and computer vision at a lab at BITS.

most of it comes down to one question i can't shake: wait, can you actually do that? — usually asked around 2am. some of the answers ship, some stay research, and a few just teach me why they don't work.

• founder-in-residence at Forge
• consultant at 180 Degrees Consulting, BITS Goa
• building hunch, an AI that texts you first
• tracking reactor bubbles with SAM2 at a BITS research lab
• back at BITS Goa after a summer at Berkeley

updated october 2026

• why hunch is picky about modelsoct 2026
• ten days of silence2024
• a brick, duct tape, and a championship2024
• my gap year, mostly2024

i'd been fascinated by colleges abroad since i was a kid. last year i got into a few and didn't go — i chose BITS, partly for my own reasons and partly for ones that weren't mine to pick. that sat with me for a while.

so when my freshman year ended, i went to the US anyway. classes at UC berkeley in the morning, san francisco in the afternoon. two months of luma events, free dinners, people much further along than me. the thing that actually changed something was them — everyone i met was high-agency, never stopped. i came back wanting to build a company, and a few months later i did.

i didn't own a laptop until covid. before that, almost everything i learned, i learned by sneaking into a room i wasn't allowed in.

when i was 7 or 8 my school had a robotics lab — but it was only for the middle and high schoolers. i was in junior school, so i technically wasn't allowed near it. so i'd sneak in during lunch breaks and just watch, and slowly started picking it up. in grade 4 i built my first real thing: a bluetooth remote-control car. it took four months, because the only time i could work on it was lunch, in that lab, with my robotics coach. after that came every arduino project i could think of — an ultrasonic radar, smart-home systems, IoT gadgets, drones — including one meant for disaster relief.

mostly, though, i was the kid who had to open everything. in grade 5 i took my camera apart, found it had rusted up inside, cleaned it out — and it just worked again. that was weirdly enlightening. after that it was the home theatre system, then DC motors, which i'd crack open to study the windings and rewind them. not everything survived my curiosity: once my dad ordered LED lights for the car, and i got so into it i bought a whole pile of my own gear too (sorry dad, it wasn't cheap), then plugged the LEDs straight into AC power just to see what would happen. it went about as badly as it sounds.

that same year i got into robo wars, and i never really stopped. from then on it was combat bot after combat bot — building them, getting them wrecked, rebuilding them, and hauling them to competition after competition. my first win came in grade 7, and i was so hyped i went straight to a national competition at IIT Delhi, where i got knocked out in the first ten seconds. somehow that's still one of the moments that shaped me most.

i kept at it all through school and ended up vice president of RoboKnights, our robotics club. one of my favourite stories from those years: i was sent to help a novice at an inter-school competition, and their robot was a wobbling, lopsided mess, barely built to stand. with seconds to spare i patched it with what was lying around — a brick and a lot of duct tape. it rolled out against sleek, polished bots, and the whole room laughed. until we won. (i wrote about it.)

i didn't have a laptop, but i had youtube. i watched everyone i wanted to learn from — Kunal Shah and Nikhil Kamath since 2019, before they were everywhere, and Elon, because my dad pointed him out to me when i was 7 or 8, back when he was nowhere near the richest person in the world.

then covid hit, i finally got a laptop, and the whole internet opened up at once. i went a little feral with it. i started a premium eyewear shop — specscafe — because i figured nobody in India was selling nice eyewear online; built the catalog, built the site, and it never really took off. the sneaker side did: i built a discord cop bot, onlydrops, that members used to buy around ₹60 lakh of sneakers in its first year and ₹90 lakh in its second. i made my first internet money on Dogecoin and GameStop, then lost all of it inside a week of trying to trade crypto. i built a site that generated NFTs for you to sell. it was a lot, all at once, and i loved every bit of it.

after grade 12 i took a gap year — partly personal reasons, mostly to figure out what i actually wanted. i joined an AI research lab at the University of Delhi and spent saturdays handing out 400+ meals with the Mayur Vihar Tamil Association. i also fell off a first-floor windowsill taking a shortcut to my room — my buffalo moment. my old school invited me back to judge robo soccer at Exun 2024 — a RoboKnights event, at a tech symposium with 25+ schools. the kid who used to sneak into the robotics lab was now the one judging. i applied abroad, got into some good schools with scholarships, and chose BITS Goa anyway.

BITS overwhelmed me. for the first time i had no idea what i wanted, so i did everything — joined every society and club i could. three or four months in, it clicked: i needed to build. i found my co-founders and we started raah AI; it began as a token predictor for billing AI-model subscriptions, then one idea turned into the next, and the next. that path led me to Forge as a founder-in-residence, surrounded by people genuinely killing it — and that's where entrepreneurship really clicked.

what's on my shelf, in my ears, and on my screen.