CIOInsider India Magazine

It’s beyond doubt that handing over your run-of the-mill business responsibilities to Artificial Intelligence today gives you the wiggle room to focus on your core business and innovation. However, that comfort fades when the AI starts to face pragmatic, unprecedented challenges it’s not trained for. This could lead to barriers like high costs, technical complexity, and data security concerns, resulting in AI-trust issues.

Gurugram-based AI lab Qolaba is on a mission to eradicate this trust issue within the AI ecosystem by making AI truly inclusive, reliable, and trustworthy.

Qolaba was founded by childhood friends Aakash Jain (Founder & CEO), a serial entrepreneur with three start-ups, and Prakhar Aggarwal (Founder & CTO), who left a ₹1.5 crore salary as an AI/ML engineer in the U.S. They foresaw a significant opportunity to democratize cutting-edge AI technology in India.

They were then joined by Akash Tyagi (Co-Founder & CPO), an ex-IES officer, IISc Bangalore graduate, and edtech veteran who helped scale Unacademy and PhysicsWallah to unicorn status. He was also instrumental in Reliance’s edtech initiative, Embibe. Akash helped define Qolaba’s vision and strategy.

Soon after, Samarth Gupta (COO) joined the founding team and played a pivotal role in streamlining operations from an AI stand point and shaping Qolaba AI Studio, followed by Mayank Gaur (CGO) to grow the business.

Together, they founded Qolaba with a mission to make powerful, user-friendly, and reliable AI solutions accessible to everyone at an affordable price, with less technical complexity and high impact. Rooted in values of innovation, empowerment, inclusivity, practicality, and ethics, Qolaba is committed to delivering AI that protects privacy and strengthens security. Akash Tyagi joins us for an exclusive conversation to dive deeper into Qolaba’s journey.

Tell us about the company's inception. What was the gap identified?
It all started with Aakash and Prakhar discussing the lack of genuine concern for data privacy and security in the biggest multinational tech corporations. They realized there was an opportunity to democratize AI in India.

At Qolaba, our vision is to make advanced AI accessible to users from

all back grounds. We founded Qolaba to solve the common challenges businesses face when adopting AI, such as high costs and technical complexity, by offering powerful, user-friendly solutions that deliver real results with minimal effort.

Through extensive product experimentation and market exploration, we developed a robust AI platform grounded in ethics, accessibility, and practical outcomes over theoretical promises.

Qolaba’s brand persona is defined by innovation, empowerment, practicality, inclusivity, and ethics, delivering impactful AI solutions that prioritize privacy and enhance security.

Can you briefly describe your products?
Qolaba empowers businesses with intelligent, autonomous AI agents that transform business operations. You can choose from three tiers, namely ready-to-use agents, a no-code builder (was Qolaba AI Studio), or fully custom agents.

Our solutions integrate with tools like Zapier and can operate UIs running 24/7. Our enterprise infrastructure supports custom LLM deployments, multimodal data, and knowledge graphs with flexible, secure deployment across cloud, on-premise, or hybrid environments.

In education, Qarrot Labs offers adaptive learning, gamified experiences, and smart tools for teachers and institutions. Qolaba also offers generative visual AI, from text-to-image to CAD conversions, avatar creation, and full visual workflow automation.

What are your flagship products and services, and what unique value can your clients expect from them?
Qolaba’s flagship offerings include customizable agentic AI solutions that automate complex tasks, enhance customer experiences, streamline sales, and integrate seamlessly into enterprise work flows.

Our Enterprise AI infrastructure features a powerful hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) engine (a system that enhances AI responses with real-time data retrieval), custom LLM deployments, multimodal data handling, and scalable deployment across cloud, on-premise, or hybrid environments to suit diverse business needs.

We also provide white-label AI SaaS tools tailored for the education sector, supporting personalized learning, automated content creation, data-driven interventions, and comprehensive assessment solutions.

Additionally, our visual AI tools enable advanced image and video generation, product photography, and multimedia content optimization. These solutions help clients achieve up to 99.5 percent operational accuracy, cut costs by 30–65 percent, and realize up to 300 percent ROI.

Could you share a recent example of such optimization achievement?
Recently, recognizing the critical need for improved student outcomes and cost-efficiency in education, we focused intensively on this sector. As part of this initiative, we partnered with a leading global health tech company facing challenges with high costs and efficiency.

By leveraging our Education AI Suite, we developed a personalized and adaptive learning path for their users. This resulted in a 64 percent reduction in their annual costs, down from ₹8.5 lakhs to around ₹3 lakhs, and halved their test creation timelines, significantly boosting student engagement and personalized learning out comes.

Similarly, a global steel manufacturer was grappling with supply chain disruptions and declining customer satisfaction. To address these challenges, they turned to Qolaba's AI agent suite.

Our Supply Agent Optimizer used real-time data to reduce disruptions by 30 percent and cut logistics costs by 15 percent. Additionally, our Customer Engagement Agent improved customer interactions, leading to a 25 percent boost in satisfaction and a 15 percent increase in retention.

What have you planned for your company for the next five years?
At Qolaba, our ultimate vision is to build AI solutions that can be seamlessly integrated into every job function across industries.

Over the next five years, we aim to expand into a broad range of use cases. For instance, we are developing a unique, AI-driven pedagogical model that supports students, teachers, and administrators in the education sector.

We’re integrating these solutions with business functions such as lead generation, post-sales service, customer insights, student support, and customer success, unifying them into a single, intelligent system. This all-in-one AI agent acts like a deeply knowledgeable team member, fully aware of every aspect of the organization from A to Z.

In truth, this vision extends beyond education. We’re actively launching B2C products and services, gaining strong traction in markets across Europe, the U.S., Nigeria, Africa, and Romania.

With each trial, we are enhancing our UI/UX, adding more functionality, expanding modalities, and improving bot performance and accessibility.

Ultimately, our goal is to empower users to launch their own companies with just a few clicks, starting from design to deployment, through a single AI powered platform.