Nirman Dave is Building Zams to Simplify How Developers Work with AI

From a small town in Gujarat to  to the forefront of Silicon Valley’s AI revolution, Nirman Dave’s journey reads like a blueprint for the kind of ambition that defies borders, playbooks, and probability. Long before AI was a boardroom buzzword, Nirman was a teenager teaching himself to code by watching YouTube videos on a borrowed laptop. He didn’t stop at learning. By the time he was 17, he had built over 200 apps—used by more than a million people worldwide—and even launched CircuiTricks, a business that turned his passion for electronics into a profitable startup.

“I was always fascinated by the idea that code could do something real in the world—solve a problem, help someone, grow personally & professionally,” he once shared. “I didn’t know what a startup was, I just knew I wanted to build.”

That spirit carried him to the U.S., where he studied Computer Science and Behavioral Economics at Hampshire College. There, he didn’t just attend classes—he built movements. HampHack, the first interdisciplinary hackathon in the country, was his brainchild, created in partnership with Google and Viacom. For Nirman, every project was a playground for systems thinking and user empathy.

In 2020, he co-founded Obviously AI, a bold response to a question many were too afraid to ask: What if anyone could build a machine learning model—without writing a single line of code? The platform went on to power 82,000+ prediction models, saving companies over 12.8 million hours of data science work. More than 3,000 businesses used it to make everyday decisions smarter—from churn prediction to lead scoring.

“We didn’t want to just democratize AI—we wanted to make it feel like magic,” Nirman said in an interview with MJF. “You upload a spreadsheet, and 30 seconds later, you get a prediction. That’s the kind of simplicity that changes behavior.”

Obviously AI earned Nirman a spot on Forbes 30 Under 30, and drew investment from some of the world’s sharpest funds—Sequoia Scouts, Facebook’s startup fund, B Capital, and TMV among them. But even as the no-code AI category boomed, Nirman’s mind was already racing toward the next frontier.

That next leap became Zams, his current company, and an emerging powerhouse in enterprise automation. If Obviously AI was about giving startups superpowers, Zams is about giving scale to the Fortune 500—without the drag of manual work. The name Zams is short for Zero Age Main Sequence, a term in astrophysics that marks the moment a star starts to shine.

“Zams is that ignition point,” Nirman explains. “Where AI stops being a pet project and starts being infrastructure.”

Today, Zams agents automate complex back-office tasks for some of the world’s largest companies—from RFQ parsing to quote generation—freeing up teams to focus on high-value work. One client added $10M in new revenue without hiring a single new person. The platform’s goal? To make deploying an enterprise AI agent feel as intuitive as building a website on Webflow.

And it’s working.

Behind the scenes, Zams is powering the kind of automation that makes operations not just efficient, but intelligent. And Nirman’s approach is refreshingly pragmatic. He doesn’t promise a utopian AI future—he ships real tools, solves real problems, and listens obsessively to the pain points of his customers.

“AI doesn’t need more theory,” he says. “It needs better design. And a hell of a lot more empathy.”

What sets Nirman apart isn’t just the scale of his ambition—it’s the clarity of his conviction. He’s a founder who’s equally at home in product reviews, investor pitches, and late-night build sessions with his team. He speaks often about the invisible work of company-building, the tension between vision and iteration, and the underestimated power of persistence.

As a fellow at INK and the Rajeev Circle, and a familiar face on AI panels and community events in SF, he continues to share that conviction freely. And yet, he stays grounded—always in builder mode, always two steps ahead.

For Nirman Dave, AI is not just a technology. It’s a tool of leverage. A creative force. A democratizer of opportunity. And most of all, it’s a blank canvas for the next generation of builders.

“The real win,” he says, “is when someone without a tech background builds an agent that changes how their company works. That’s when I know we’re doing our job.”