In 2019, while most people 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.
A Strategic Decision
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.
Self-Taught Coding Journey
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, and forums where developers helped strangers debug problems at midnight 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.'
Recognition and Impact
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.'
A Broader Lesson
It would be easy to read Suraj Biswas's story as a feel-good arc — the humble beginning, the grind, the big break. But it's more than that. 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.
About the Author
Maitree Baral is a health journalist on a mission: making medical science digestible and healthcare approachable. Covering everything from wellness trends to life-changing medical research, she turns complex health topics into engaging, actionable stories readers can actually use.
