Tanay Pratap
Building applied intelligence for enterprises and institutions.
Pratap builds intelligent systems at the intersection of applied AI research and large-scale system design — in banking, healthcare, education, and enterprise operations.
Four years at Microsoft shipping products to 100M+ users. A decade of work in deep learning, NLP, and computer vision. Today, he leads research at On Ground Labs and consults with institutions on deploying intelligent systems.
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100M+
Users served at Microsoft
$5M
Venture funding raised
3
Patent domains filed
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Domains
Banking & Financial Services
Intelligent document processing and agentic automation for US banking institutions.
Healthcare
AI steward systems for patient care, diagnostics, and medical coding in the Middle East.
Education
Immersive learning platforms, AI-ready curriculum design, and university partnerships for applied engineering talent.
Research & Academia
Small language models, alignment research, and open-source benchmarks with Manipal University.
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“Intelligence — artificial or otherwise — is only valuable when it stays grounded in real problems, real institutions, and real people.”
Currently Building
On Ground Labs
Applied AI research. 23 researchers, 14 projects, 4 papers in review.
Past Ventures
Invact
Immersive learning platform. $5M funded. 100+ alumni placed at Flipkart, TCS, Deloitte.
14 years of building systems, companies, and research.
Thoughts
May 22, 2025
The Zero-Click Problem — What Happens When Nobody Visits Your Website
Both Microsoft Build and Google I/O announced the same thing: search is no longer about links. It's about answers. The economic consequences are enormous.
September 18, 2025
The Trillion-Parameter Trap
For three years, the AI narrative has been scale. More parameters, more GPUs. I think the real shift is the opposite — small models that actually deploy.
November 23, 2025
Why Ambition Alone Doesn't Build AI Infrastructure
India needs its own AI infrastructure. The ambition is right. The question is execution — and the pattern in ventures that struggle is consistent.
December 21, 2025
Why Big Tech Is Betting $70 Billion on India
Microsoft committed $17.5B. Amazon committed $35B. Google added $5B. Combined, nearly $70 billion. An engineer asked me: is this real? I followed the money.
January 30, 2026
Two Strategies for Building Intelligence
For three years, the assumption was: scale wins. Then DeepSeek proved that architectural efficiency can match brute-force compute. The implications ripple far beyond Silicon Valley.
For consulting engagements and institutional partnerships: tanay.mit@gmail.com