'Hire attractive people': Indian-origin CEOs face racist trolling as they announce $61M fund for their startup

IIT Kharagpur graduates and Forbes 30 Under 30 alums Varun Vummadi and Esha Manideep were subjected to vicious trolling as they released their video announcing that their San Francisco-based startup Giga has raised $61 million.

They were trolled for their appearance, their accent and also their project as it has a call center connection. But there were enough voices to school the trolls that there are many "attractive" people on this planet but not everyone has a purpose. Giga, the Indian duo's voice AI startup, is already working with food delivery company DoorDash. With the fresh funding, the company is looking to scale up usage within Fortune 100 enterprises and grow its team.

Giga creates AI systems capable of handling live interactions for large businesses. In the video that they released, the CEO described how their AI functions within two weeks after it starts working with a company. The AI agent can simultaneously chat and talk and speak in different languages.

But the comment section was full of racist trolling. "If you raise $61M maybe hire attractive people for the demo," one wrote and was immediately schooled by other social meda users.

"When people can’t compete in brilliance, they attack appearance. That’s not humor that’s insecurity," one wrote. "Watch them become millionaires while your groyper ass slaves away for a $12/h job," another wrote. "Idea for a satirical novel: Two Indians learn about AI and immediately apply it to create an outsourced customer services back office, unwittingly sowing the seeds for the collapse of the Indian economy," a second hate comment said. "These 2 kids are ugly, not well spoken english with an insane jeet accent. But theyre autistic af, hence why i understand now the $61m raise," another troll wrote. Varun and Esha both rejected job offers to pursue their startup journey since 2023. "After graduation, we were presented with some incredible opportunities. Esha was offered a $150K job as a system engineer role with a prominent Indian HFT firm. I received a PhD offer from Stanford University and a $525K job offer from an international HFT as a quant trader. We left all those opportunities to pursue our passion towards solving challenging problems in Machine learning," Varun Vummadi wrote on LinkedIn when Giga was launched.