He delivered food for Zomato to pay college fees, now he’s the founder of a recognised AI startup: Suraj Biswas’ inspiring journey

In 2019, while most people of his age in Bengaluru were figuring out career options, Suraj Biswas was doing something different. He was delivering food. Not because he had no other choice, but because he made this choice. His father back home was a labourer who had carried a quiet, stubborn dream, that his son would one day become a doctor. But life had other plans. Gradually, the cost of education had a way of making dreams feel complicated. Fees, rent, food, transport. It all added up fast, and Suraj knew that waiting for things to get easier wasn't a plan.

So he signed up as a Zomato delivery partner.

It was a strategy. The gig brought in anywhere between ₹40,000 and ₹50,000 a month, Suraj says. But more than the income, it gave him something that a conventional part-time job couldn't: flexibility. He could choose his hours and structure his days around his classes.

A smartphone, a laptop, and a lot of stubbornness

Between deliveries, Suraj was teaching himself to code. What he had was a smartphone, a laptop, and access to the internet. Online tutorials, open-source communities, forums where developers helped strangers debug problems at midnight, these became his classroom.

"I had faith that if I continued to learn with dedication, I could change my life by starting something on my own," Suraj has said. And that belief, as it turned out, had legs.

From the road to the founding table

What Suraj was quietly building toward, through all those hours of self-directed learning, was an understanding of artificial intelligence that went beyond surface-level familiarity. He was learning to think about what those tools could do better, how AI could be built to actually understand people, not just generate outputs at them. "I didn't set out to build AI. I set out to understand people," his LinkedIn bio says.

That thinking eventually became Assessli, an AI startup focused on personalized tools that offer real-time guidance, support better decision-making, and improve productivity.

"My goal was never to be the loudest founder in the room," Suraj told the Times of India. "It was to build one thing that outlasts me — intelligence that understands people instead of just predicting them. If I get that right, I'll have done my job."

Assessli has been recognised among the top two AI startups on F6S, a global platform that tracks millions of companies across industries and geographies. For a founder who was navigating Bengaluru traffic on a delivery bike just a few years ago, that's a number worth sitting with.

"From a delivery bike to building a foundational model, the lesson never changed," he said. "Nobody owes you permission to build the future. You earn it by refusing to wait — and you keep it by never forgetting where you started."

It would be easy to read Suraj Biswas's story as a feel-good arc, the humble beginning, the grind, the big break. It's an argument about what happens when earning opportunity and learning access exist in the same window of time.

In a country where talent consistently runs ahead of opportunity, that combination, earning, learning, and the freedom to imagine more, turned out to be enough.