Guwahati: This Durga puja, Mahendra Bagaria from Dibrugarh district of Assam had twice the reason to celebrate. His son, 26-year-old prodigy Kishan Bagaria, had secured a mammoth deal with noted American entrepreneur Matt Mullenweg.
Mullenweg, the founder of Automattic Inc, known for the web content management system WordPress, bought the Assam’s youth’s messaging application ‘Texts.com’ for a whopping Rs 416 crore ($50 million). Mullenweg called Bagaria a "generational tech genius" with a lasting influence in the tech industry. Quite the words of praise coming from an industry leader like Mullenweg!
Business North East recently reached out to Kishan’s father for a bit of insight into the making of the prodigy. Bagaria senior, a tax official by profession, said he does not believe that formal education “is the only thing that matters” when it comes to success.
Indeed, his son, before making it big, dropped out of school in the 10th standard. “He did appear for his 12th in the private mode. He even scored well. However, he never bothered to check his marks”, Kishan’s father told us.
Despite his son’s unconventional approach towards education, Bagaria recalled, he had always had a “great deal of faith in [his] son.” “As far as I know, he has been a tech enthusiast since his childhood days”, he said.
The older Bagaria said that his son "never had any technical training." "I firmly believe that he always had it in him. We would often talk about these kinds of things at home, and he just went ahead and developed it. As far as the technical aspect is concerned, he learned it all by himself", he said.
A move to the US, home to the Silicon Valley, the tech hub of the world, proved to be fruitful for the enterprising Kishan. “The USA”, said his father, “gave my son what he needed to improve his messenger app.”
The rest, as they say, is history. Texts.com, developed by the Assam whiz kid, attracted the attention of the who’s who of the tech world. “Many people linked to the IT sector wanted to come on board as investors”, the proud father shared with Business North East.
At a time when people have a plethora of apps to choose from for their messaging needs, Texts.com will bring these – including iMessage, Slack, WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, Messenger, LinkedIn, Signal, Discord, and X – into a single dashboard. According to reports, Bagaria is set to join the team as the head of messaging and will continue to play a crucial role in the project going forward.
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