Atharva Kulkarni

I’m Atharva Kulkarni, a second-year Computer Engineering student in Mumbai, and a co-founder of Zhessor, a three-person studio where we build websites, apps and AI tools for businesses.

I started early. In 8th grade I did a basic ethical hacking course, and since then I’ve wanted to know how things work underneath. Later I ran a small web agency, building sites for clients like BYKBangles and Eyeblaze. That’s where I learned that clients don’t care how clever the code is. They care whether it brings them business.

Zhessor grew out of that. With Harshil and Abhijit, I’ve shipped zhessor.com, built our own internal studio (Zhessor Core) to run leads, clients and projects, and started turning the tools we use ourselves into products. Zhessor Tasks is the first of those. I usually work in Next.js, Tailwind, Cloudflare and Vercel. I build UI first and add the logic after, and I like to own a thing end to end. I’m also working with an AI model on my own GPU, because I want to understand AI deeply rather than just wrap it.

Outside code, I write. My novel Almost Alive is published and available on Amazon, Flipkart and Pothi. It’s about holding on and letting go. I also write poetry in a mix of Urdu and Hindi, mostly about love versus logic and the contradictions people carry around. Writing and engineering feel like the same thing to me: you take something messy and make it make sense.

What I care about is building things that last. One rule I go by is “someone else’s feature shouldn’t be your product”: if a big platform could add your idea as a button, it isn’t a business. I want financial stability first, then I want to build something serious. Long term, that’s a defence technology company.

Zhessor, a three-person studio in Mumbai that builds websites, apps and AI tools for businesses, and is turning its own internal tools into products, starting with Zhessor Tasks.