At Foyer, Pratyush Rai, Siddhartha Saxena and Sirsendu Sarkar are bringing the power of AI to wherever you browse or work on the net
(From right ti left) Pratyush Rai, Siddhartha Saxena and Sirsendu Sarkar, Cofounders, Foyer
Pratyush Rai’s epiphany, with respect to his purpose, happened when he was an associate with BCG, the well-known global consultancy. He was on a team that was consulting with a large consumer products company at the time, when Covid struck, and he saw firsthand what happens when there’s an unexpected cash crunch even at a large company.
The client was “employee-first” and didn’t want to fire anyone, while a competitor had laid off many people, he recalls. Eventually, this story had a happy ending with the cash flow crunch sorted out in a few weeks. But it left an impression on the young IIT-Kanpur civil engineering graduate.
He teamed up with two of his friends from college, Siddhartha Saxena and Sirsendu Sarkar, to do something meaningful on their own. And, after various ideas and iterations, they decided to build something that would “nudge” developers to make them aware of things they were missing.
From there, it was a rapid journey to Merlin, their current product, which is a chrome extension that allows users to call ChatGPT literally with click of a button—Ctrl+M on a Windows computer and Cmd+M on a Mac. And their startup, incorporated in the US, and based in Bengaluru, is called Foyer, founded in 2021.
“Merlin is a fairly simple product. It just embeds inside your browser,” Rai explains. “It goes on some of your high DAU (daily active user) websites, such as YouTube, Gmail, LinkedIn and Twitter, and it solves some critical functions.”