At Amazon, Nagu Gopalakrishnan worked on a programme to implement a major piece of European Union regulation across the business. Companies had years of notice, and in the teams he operated in, close to 80% of the effort still ended up going into the regulatory side. That was a massive figure indicating at a bigger implication. If a company with Amazon's resources had to pull that much attention away from product, he wondered what the same moment would look like for a smaller organisation once regulation catches up with AI.
Around the same time his co-founder, who is also his wife, was seeing a related worry in academia, where researchers were putting new ideas into AI tools and asking where that value might end up. The two of them set up a small AI lab at home, the organisational concern met the privacy concern, and Vidai began as a proof of concept.
Nagu describes Vidai as a control room. It shows an organisation how AI is being used across the business and what data is going out, and it keeps a record to draw on when new rules arrive, while leaving teams free to use whichever AI they choose. The company started in September 2025 and released its first free community version in June 2026. When we spoke it was pre-revenue, with pilots running across several industries and a team of two. That size is informed by experience. Amazon talks about the two-pizza team of 12 or 13 people, and Nagu believes AI brings that down to a one-pizza team of around six per product.
"And even if you have to meet, there are venues and avenues you need to search for, you need to be part of it. But Techscaler gave all of those in a pre-packaged way, if you really look at it, right?" - Nagu Gopalakrishnan, Co-founder, Vidai
A first venture is material to build on
Both co-founders came to Vidai having been part of earlier startups that didn't go the way they'd hoped, and Nagu's, which he built with four other founders, ended with the team selling the IP and moving on. What that venture taught him was how fast things can move when the person with the idea is also the person who can build it, because in his years leading product teams at large companies every idea had to go to engineering and be negotiated over before anyone could see whether it worked. He enjoyed that speed while he had it and missed it as soon as the venture ended, and missing it is what turned his mind to how he could build on everything he'd learned.
He's careful about how he frames that chapter. He treats it as learning that would be wasted if he didn't build on it. For a while he held back from talking about it at home, until conversations in the US showed him it was read there as a badge of honour. The experienced investors he speaks to now tend to see it the same way, as risk that has already been worked through.
If an earlier venture didn't work out, bring it into the room. Tell investors what it taught you and how the next company is built on it.
"Because in reality it is a badge of honour, because you learned what will not work, what all things can go wrong, and you learned a lot of technical aspects which we can implement and make it better." - Nagu Gopalakrishnan, Co-founder, Vidai
Twenty-three years of knowing how the other one works
Nagu and his co-founder, Dr. Sivapriya, met at college around 25 years ago and have been married for 23. Both had seen co-founder relationships come under strain in their earlier ventures, and that shaped the decision to build this one together. A new co-founder has to learn how you work. These two already know where the other is strong and where the other is likely to struggle. She plans, writes things down and executes. He says he works on chaos and needs a deadline to deliver.
They do disagree. When it happens, they put the options into a document or onto a whiteboard with the pros and cons beside each one, and they let the logic settle it. They've also started keeping one day a week when they don't talk to each other about work, even if each of them is still taking calls separately.
Being a married founding team has come up in fundraising too. Some funds in the US and some in the UK have told them they don't invest in husband-and-wife teams. Across the UK and Europe more widely, they're also meeting investors who read the same fact as a sign of stability and maturity. Their answer has been to choose carefully. They've put everything into Vidai, and they look for investors who are willing to join that journey with them.
"So there is no question of emotional decision-making in this scenario because both of us are emotional, which basically means it has to boil down to something logical." - Nagu Gopalakrishnan, Co-founder, Vidai
Someone to talk to who has been there
Nagu first came across Techscaler at a coffee evening in Stirling around 2021 or 2022, when a startup was still an idea and a monthly salary made it easy to leave it there. He came back once Vidai was underway and the product was taking shape.
What stood out was the Entrepreneurs in Residence offering. Founders can have a team around them and still feel very alone, he says, because some people only congratulate you and others assume you're about to ask for business or a favour. You end up careful about what you say. With an EIR who has built companies before, that caution goes. Some sessions produce a new idea and some are simply a chance to be listened to, and he values both. Most of his conversations have been with EIR Sarah.
The EIRs have also made warm introductions to investors, which matters in a small investor community. The founders he travelled to New York with became a support network of their own, to the point of taking meetings on each other's behalf when diaries clashed.
"But you have somebody to talk to which is brilliant, right? That's a baseline which EIR provides, which I don't think any other ecosystem in Scotland provides today." - Nagu Gopalakrishnan, Co-founder, Vidai
Walk in with more than one way to win
At a CodeBase event with CoreWeave, Nagu went in thinking about collaboration and customer referrals. The conversation showed him something he hadn't planned for: data centre providers bring the compute, and their customers still need a software layer to govern how it's used, which is where Vidai fits. He is now in discussions with four or five data centre companies, a segment that wasn't on his list before that day.
His preparation for rooms like that is the same whether the audience is a partner or an investor. Vidai is a deeply technical product, so he works out in advance how technical to go, and he brings a crib sheet with a second route to switch to if he sees faces change. He researches what the other side does, where they've invested and what tends to interest them, and he asks people who've already met them.
He also ranks his objectives. The first might be investment. If that doesn't land, a referral to a potential customer is the second. Behind that sits useful insight, including what they know about competitors. Early on, missing the top objective felt like a loss. Now he counts any of them as a good meeting.
A YC alumni dinner hosted by EIR Hannah with Barclays Eagle Labs sharpened two more habits. Naz asked founders to look at their calendars and see how the time splits between product work and customer conversations. Nagu loves building and writing code, and his calendar showed it, so he now blocks set time for each. Hearing how many attempts another alumnus made before getting into YC changed how he reads a rejection. A no tells you something about timing or about how mature the story is. He now has fewer investor conversations and is clear with himself about which ones are for feedback and which are for investment.
"Somebody saying no is not a no. That only tells you, makes your pitch better, gives you much more maturity in terms of how you can tell the story, and also gives you to go, why did they say no?" - Nagu Gopalakrishnan, Co-founder, Vidai
Prepare there, comply here
Nagu joined Techscaler's New York cohort in June 2026 with US prospects already in conversation. He knew the market from his corporate years, when an established name got him meetings and onto vendor panels. Arriving as a founder was different. You go back through every old contact you have, he says, and if you ask for 100 meetings you might get 10, with two moving to a next stage. He considers that a good result.
Tech Week events brought prospects he hadn't expected, including a social media company with heavy AI use that is now running a trial. He also came home with potential advisers and a clearer view of his competitors, having spoken to some of them directly.
The bigger lesson was how differently the two markets buy. In the US, the conversation turns technical almost immediately, and a buyer who has an engineer working on the same problem will suggest comparing notes and running a trial. Nagu puts the pace at roughly ten times faster. The other side of that speed is that the next vendor can replace you just as quickly. In Europe, buyers look for stability and proof, the sales cycle is longer, and once you're in you become part of the infrastructure.
So he runs two pitches: in the US he talks about getting ready for regulation that is likely to come, with cost governance as the way in. In Europe he leads with value and with compliance once a regulation is in force.
The story does most of the work
Competing in Scottish EDGE taught Nagu that a strong idea and a capable team don't carry a pitch by themselves. By his estimate, around 80% of it comes down to whether the story lands with the judges in front of you. The feedback he received was to slow down, which he puts down to the natural pace of his first language.
He applies the same thinking to his own profile. With so much AI-generated content repeating itself, he tries to write about what the models aren't already saying, and he posts every week. Inbound connection requests have gone from about five a month to three or four a week. He's also putting effort into his personal brand, because early customers and investors are placing their trust in the individual.
Post consistently, and say the thing that isn't already being said.
What comes next
The focus for the next 18 months is customer traction on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK that includes working with Fintech Scotland to reach banks and financial institutions. In the US it means leading with cost governance, which opens up a much wider market. Nagu hopes to be raising a Series A in around 18 months.
Building in Scotland started as circumstance, since it's where the family lived. Looking back, he sees real advantages. People who take a job here tend to stay, the cost of building a team is favourable, and government support adds another layer.
For anyone with long corporate experience and an idea they haven't acted on, his advice is practical. Start working on it now, gather as much feedback from potential customers as you can, and give yourself around six months of personal financial leeway before you jump.
"So as early as possible, the more you engage with CodeBase, that would be fruitful for you in the long run." - Nagu Gopalakrishnan, Co-founder, Vidai
Click here to follow Vidai's progress on LinkedIn.
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