Arun Setty Kodavali
Storyteller · Tinkerer · Thinker · Engineer
Human with the excellence reflex.
Storyteller, primarily. That's what I keep coming back to. I tell them in essays at Ephemeral Thoughts (most days), in code at Ur AI (every day), and in a media diary at A·S·K Log that ends up being a more honest record of who I am than the rest of this page combined.
Below all of that: a tinkerer with an excellence reflex. The kind of person who broke open the cassette player as a kid just to see how it worked, and never quite stopped. Years later that same instinct meant taping my dad's old phone to a fish-pond engine and using the accelerometer to detect when the vibration stopped, so we'd get an alert instead of losing the fish to an oxygen failure. Aquaculture, hacked with Android sensors. Most of what I publish at Ephemeral Thoughts sits in that same space, between engineering and behavior: decisions, rules, mental models, the small things that compound.
Currently CTO and co-founder of Ur AI, building AI products for structured workflows, document intelligence, automation, the things knowledge workers actually do. Before this: founding engineer at Trupeer (where I shipped a video-first knowledge system in two days that hit $150K in revenue its first week), then Brokenatom (a full-stack no-code platform I built end-to-end in the pre-AI era). Software intern at Disney Hotstar before any of that. Twenty-five years old, four out of college.
Education
B.Tech in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. That's where I fell into both the rigour of CS and the breadth of philosophical thinking, and never quite separated them again.
How I think about building
The best software comes from understanding people, not just technology. Every system we build is a reflection of how we think about the world. I'm drawn to questions about consciousness, systems thinking, and the ethics of the tools we make.
I have been a stoic, hedonist, atheist, theist, and many other things along the way. Now I just am a philo-suffer (a pun).
Whatever I'm calling myself this week, the working method has stayed the same: focus on what you can control, build with intention, and ask whether what you're making genuinely serves the people who'll use it.
Earlier projects
A selection of academic work from IIT Bombay, the projects that shaped how I think about systems, languages, and computation.
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Movie Recommendation System
Web application that recommends movies based on user ratings, with a buddy system for sharing recommendations between friends.
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Online Forms & Surveys
Platform for creating forms and surveys with built-in analytics, graphs and charts over MySQL, and granular sharing controls (public, organization, or specific users).
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Grammar Correction Tool
Offline grammar correction and word-prediction tool over a 250k+ word corpus, using an optimised Decision Tree algorithm and a Racket GUI.
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Basic Machine Learning
Decision-tree predictor in Racket using entropy reduction as the splitting criterion, with custom abstract data structures for the tree.
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Racket Interpreter
Internal interpreter for Racket using the environment model of execution: frames, pointers, and lexical scope from scratch.
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Cryptanalysis & Decryption
Decrypted mono-alphabetic substitution ciphers using ETAOIN frequency analysis and common-word heuristics for finding the key.
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C-like Language Interpreter
Compiler/interpreter for a C-like language with AST generation and intermediate-code emission.
What I do on weekends
I run an informal weekend hacker house in Bangalore with a small group of friends. It started after an Anthropic hackathon when we built something usable in 48 hours and realised that having a focused group in the same room was the unlock. Now it's a regular ritual: 5 to 6-hour Saturday sessions, pizza, laptops, a strong bias toward shipping.
One of the things I built through it is Arise, a health-tech app that tracks daily vitals and visualizes progress through a gamified leveling system. About 20 people in beta, ~40% active every two days, over 5 million steps tracked between us. Currently studying the power-user patterns to design nudges that get the rest of the group walking more.
For the record
25 years old, based in Bengaluru. Won the Salesforce AI Pitchfield (2025) with the Trupeer team, $100K from Salesforce Ventures. JEE Advanced AIR 222 back when that was the metric. Otherwise: reading, driving, writing, sleeping. Trying to write more than I consume.