For Shivam Pankaj Kumar, the journey from writing his first lines of code in elementary school to co-founding a stealth-mode startup valued at $30 million is a story of curiosity, courage, and relentless execution.
The spark first ignited in second grade, when Shivam discovered the Logo programming language. That early fascination quickly evolved—from QBASIC to Java to C++—eventually leading him to pursue a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science. It didn’t take long for major tech players to take notice.
After graduating, Shivam joined Microsoft India in January 2020, where he spent over two years building core infrastructure for Azure. “Microsoft was foundational,” he reflects. “But deep down, I realized I wanted more—I wanted to build something of my own. I just didn’t have the guts to do it yet.”
IMAGE: SHIVAM PANKAJ KUMAR
That hunger for creation led Shivam to the United States, where he pursued a master’s degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—his launchpad into the heart of Silicon Valley.
By May 2023, he was interning at Palantir, tackling large-scale data challenges. Then came Rubrik in January 2024, where he worked on cutting-edge cloud data management. But the entrepreneurial itch only grew stronger.
Today, Shivam is the co-founder of a stealth-mode startup with bold ambitions. After closing a $1.5 million pre-seed round at a $7.5 million valuation, the team is now raising a $3 million seed round at a $30 million valuation. While details remain under wraps, the startup is already making waves—thanks in no small part to Shivam’s hacker-minded leadership and product-first ethos.
Much of that edge comes from Shivam’s prolific hackathon track record. In 2023, he earned a podium finish at the first-ever McKinsey Hackathon, followed by another standout performance at HackGPT at Cornell, where he and his team built Agrow—an offline IVR-based LLM pipeline that delivered hyper-local farming insights to remote agricultural communities. “This was before RAG and offline LLMs were trending,” Shivam says. “We were early movers, experimenting with real-world use cases.”
Most recently, he placed among the top teams at the Y Combinator MCP Hackathon with VibeOps, a developer-first DevOps tool designed to help engineers ship code faster using natural language. “We prototyped this in 8 hours,” he says. “Hackathons teach you to move fast, learn faster, and ditch your ego. That mindset shapes how I run my company.”
In an industry where innovation can be outdated within months, Shivam’s approach is refreshingly grounded: be curious, stay adaptable, and don’t get too attached. “Just because something works today doesn’t mean it’ll work tomorrow,” he says. “The ability to pivot, re-learn, and discard what no longer serves—that’s the real superpower.”
As his stealth startup quietly gains momentum, Shivam Pankaj Kumar is emerging as a name to watch—a builder, a hacker, and now a founder who’s proving that in tech, speed, humility, and relentless curiosity may just be the new venture capital.
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