Sanjay Bhargava, a name synonymous with pioneering ventures like PayPal and Starlink India, now champions a new mission: empowering the next generation of founders to harness AI as “fire” for societal transformation. Through his initiative, TI Seed (TISEED), Bhargava is backing youth-led, AI-powered ventures poised to create trillion-dollar, society-scale outcomes.
With decades of experience at the forefront of tech innovation, from building financial systems at Citibank to connecting the unconnected with Starlink, Bhargava brings a unique perspective to the AI revolution. In this exclusive interview for Qolaba’s AI Builder Series, he shares his vision for AI’s democratizing power, his “problem-first” approach to building, and why purpose-driven investing is the key to unlocking massive impact.
Connectivity as Rails, AI as the Engine
Bhargava’s tenure as Country Director for Starlink India offered a powerful lesson in the symbiotic relationship between infrastructure and innovation. “Starlink’s vision was always about more than just connectivity — it was about unlocking human potential at the edges of the world,” he explains.
AI and automation were not merely supplementary but essential to this vision, operating at three crucial levels:
- Satellite Constellation Management: AI is indispensable for managing thousands of satellites in real-time, optimizing coverage, and avoiding collisions.
- Demand Prediction: AI helps prioritize connectivity rollout by predicting economic activity patterns, ensuring resources are deployed where they can have the most impact.
- Cost Reduction: Automation in manufacturing and deployment is what makes “affordable” connectivity possible at scale.
“The real opportunity I saw: connectivity is the rails, AI is what runs on them,” Bhargava asserts. “When a farmer in rural Bihar gets Starlink, the question becomes — what AI-powered services can we pipe through that connection to transform their livelihood? That’s where trillion-dollar impact lives.”
The Trillion-Dollar Mandate: AI’s Democratizing Power
With a career spanning startup advisory, corporate leadership, and tech innovation, Bhargava identifies three emerging AI applications that excite him most for their potential industrial and societal impact:
- AI-Native Financial Inclusion: Having spent years building systems for the top 1% at Citibank, Bhargava now sees AI flipping that model. “Credit scoring without traditional data, personalized financial advice at near-zero marginal cost, behavioral nudges that help people save and invest,” he envisions. For India’s 140 million underserved families, this isn’t just a market; “that’s a mandate.”
- AI in Governance: Bhargava believes AI can dramatically compress bureaucratic bottlenecks. Imagine “RFPs that are one page, government labs where startups can experiment, regulatory sandboxes that actually enable innovation.” AI can shrink decision cycles from years to weeks.
- Agentic AI: The shift from chatbots to AI that can actively execute—browsing, booking, negotiating, deploying code—is a game-changer. “That shift changes everything about what a small team can accomplish,” he notes. “An exceptional 3-person team with the right AI tools today can outperform a 50-person team from 2020.”
The common thread weaving through these opportunities is clear: “AI isn’t just automation — it’s democratization. That’s what creates trillion-dollar impact.”
TISEED’s Blueprint: Problem-First, AI-Powered Ventures
TISEED is founded on the audacious idea that AI can unlock trillion-dollar companies by addressing real-world problems. Bhargava’s criteria for selecting ventures are rigorous, focusing on three core elements for massive impact: a massive problem, a scalable solution, and an exceptional team.
AI fundamentally changes the equation for all three:
- For the problem: AI makes previously unsolvable problems tractable. “Personalized education for 1.4 billion Indians? Impossible with humans. Achievable with AI.”
- For the solution: Bhargava calls it the “infinity equation”—as the user base grows, the cost per user should approach zero. “AI-native systems do this naturally. Traditional systems don’t.”
- For the team: He’s not looking for AI experts but for “missionaries who obsess over a problem and see AI as a tool, not a destination.” The best founders, in his view, are those who declare, “here’s the problem I’ll die trying to solve”—not “here’s a cool AI thing I built.”
His evaluation framework is pragmatic: “Can this team, with 500K and 18 months, build something valuable enough to raise 10M at a $50M valuation? In the AI era, exceptional teams can do this. Capital efficiency is the new superpower.”
The Coach with “Deep Scars”: Mentoring for Scale
As the solo founder at TISEED, Bhargava’s role is less about direct building and more about strategic guidance. “The dirty secret of the AI era: you don’t need massive teams or capital anymore. What you need are coaches who’ve been there, done that,” he reveals.
His approach is rooted in pattern recognition, leveraging decades of experience scaling companies across continents to save founders years of mistakes. Practically, he focuses on three key areas:
- Strategic Focus: He pushes young founders to “dominate a beachhead first. One vertical. One geography. One customer segment. Nail it, then expand.”
- Narrative Clarity: Founders must articulate why they will win. “We iterate on the story until it’s bulletproof — not just pitch-ready, but objection-proof.”
- Network Leverage: His endorsements from figures like Elon Musk and Reid Hoffman are not trophies but tools to open doors, accelerating timelines for TISEED companies ready for Series A.
“The heavy lifting is theirs. I’m just a coach with strong opinions and deep scars,” he humbly states.
TISEED: A Launchpad for Purpose-Driven Innovation
TISEED distinguishes itself from traditional funds through its unique model as an ecosystem builder for AI-driven global companies. Bhargava highlights a fundamental misalignment in traditional VC: “they need markups and exits to justify their fund economics. That pushes founders toward premature scaling, excessive dilution, and sometimes building for acquisition rather than impact.”
Operating with his own capital and a 20-year time horizon, Bhargava doesn’t need exits; he needs impact. This allows him to take bets that traditional VCs can’t, backing “a brilliant 19-year-old with an audacious vision but no traction” if they pass his “missionary vs. mercenary” test.
The challenge of being a solo founder means limited bandwidth, so he goes deep with a handful of exceptional teams. But TISEED is more than just a checkbook. It’s a launchpad, creating knowledge resources—AI-generated podcasts, curated playbooks—to benefit even founders he doesn’t directly fund.
“The endgame: I want to prove that purpose-driven investing — taking minimal equity, prioritizing impact over returns — can produce trillion-dollar companies,” Bhargava concludes. “If TISEED works, it becomes a model others can replicate.”
This interview is a part of Qolaba’s AI Builder Series featuring thought leaders who are showcasing innovation and driving change with AI.
Sanjay Bhargava is the founder of TI Seed (TISEED), an initiative that treats AI as “fire” and aims to back youth-led, AI-powered ventures that can create trillion-dollar, society-scale outcomes. He draws on his experience as a PayPal founding team member and former Starlink India Country Director, focusing on mentoring young founders and designing playbooks for entrepreneurs using AI to solve real problems for billions of people.
