Co-founder and CEO, Mad Street Den (Vue.ai) | Founded 2013 | Chennai
In 2015, when artificial intelligence was still a niche subject in India, the CEO of a young Chennai AI start-up made an admission that surprised people. “I don’t write a single line of code,” Ashwini Asokan told HerStory.
She said it without apology. She was a designer and a trained classical dancer, married to a neuroscientist, and together they had left Silicon Valley to build an AI company in Chennai. For the next decade, she ran it.
A dancer first
Ashwini grew up in Chennai. Her father was the biggest influence on her, and she has credited him with her mix of interests, across dance, music, design and computing. “Somehow, he seems to know everything about everything,” she told HerStory in 2015.
For a long time, though, she did not think she would work in technology at all. She trained as a classical dancer and musician, and between the ages of 14 and 21, she travelled across India performing. Sure that she would become an artist, she barely attended college, HerStory reported.
Her father had other plans. He insisted she do a master’s degree.
Teaching machines to move
She went to Carnegie Mellon University in the United States for a master’s in interaction design. Her two worlds met in her thesis. She studied what she called movement grammars, asking how cultural dance forms could shape the way movement is designed into robots and digital agents.
A decade at Intel
After Carnegie Mellon she joined Intel, where she would spend about ten years. She worked in a user experience group led by the anthropologist Genevieve Bell, learning how people-centred research shapes the way technology is built. Her work stretched across hardware, software and sensors.
In her last four years at Intel, she led the mobile research agenda for Intel Labs, working with machine learning, image recognition and what was then called contextual computing. It was here that her interest in AI grew.
A neuroscientist at home
Her husband, Anand Chandrasekaran, came to AI from the other direction. He was a neuroscientist who had spent about a decade in academic labs, and at Stanford he was part of the team that built Neurogrid, a system that simulated a million neurons in real time, FactorDaily reported.
The two had met as students and married during their postgraduate years, Entrepreneur India reported in 2018. Between them, they had spent a combined 25 years working in the United States, according to TechCrunch.
Their many conversations about AI and its future turned into a plan: a company that would bring AI and computer vision to people in a meaningful way. He would build the AI. She would design the products that put it in people’s hands.
“Getting to know Anand was bliss. We could talk about everything around us,” she told Entrepreneur India.
“A very deliberate decision”
They chose to build that company in India, and in Chennai. Mad Street Den was launched at YourStory’s MobileSparks event in 2013, and the couple wound up their life in the US and moved home.
“Relocating was a very deliberate decision,” she told TechCrunch in January 2015. “People in India and Asia are leaping frogging generations of technology, and we thought ‘where better to experiment with this stuff?'” When YourStory asked why they would come back to India to do AI, her answer was short: “The answer is simple – the consumer market here is exploding.”
Ashwini became CEO. Anand became CTO.
Their first product was MADStack, a cloud platform that offered computer vision tools through an API. Its main use was visual search for fashion shopping: a customer could photograph a dress and find similar items online. The company stayed bootstrapped, with six full-time staff, until early 2015, when it raised a $1.5 million (about ₹9 crore) seed round from Reservoir Investments’ Exfinity Fund and GrowX Ventures. It was one of the larger seed rounds in India that year. “We weren’t looking to raise funds to be honest,” the founders told YourStory.
Through those early years, Ashwini was also raising two young children. In 2015, she was the mother of a four-and-a-half-year-old and a six-month-old. She has been open that the work at home was shared. “We demand that from each other and we will take nothing lesser than that from each other,” she told HerStory, and said of Anand that “he’s more of a feminist than I’ve ever been.”
Vue.ai and the business of retail
The company soon found its focus. Its first vertical was Vue.ai, which used AI to help online retailers show shoppers relevant products and styles, tag large catalogues automatically and understand customers’ tastes in colour, pattern, fit and look.
In 2016, Sequoia Capital India led Mad Street Den’s Series A, with Exfinity and GrowX joining. The amount was not disclosed, though FactorDaily reported sources putting it at close to $5 million. “Business of retail is an increasingly tense market that needs to be reimagined,” Ashwini said at the time.
That year she spoke at YourStory’s TechSparks, where the write-up noted that the CEO of this AI company did not code. “AI in India is still in very early days,” she said, and also: “Women in tech is not a bad word.”
In 2018, Japanese telecom company KDDI invested through a fund managed by Global Brain, to help Mad Street Den grow in Japan and Asia. In April 2019, the company raised a $17 million Series B led by Falcon Edge Capital, with Sequoia India and Global Brain, taking its total funding to $27.5 million, VentureBeat reported. Its customers included Macy’s, Levi’s, Diesel, ThredUp, Tata and Mercado Libre.
“The future of retail is entertainment. The experience economy we see today is the start of that era,” Ashwini told VentureBeat.
Beyond retail
Over the next few years, Mad Street Den set out to become a broader enterprise AI platform. It moved into finance, insurance, healthcare, pharma and logistics, and in 2022 it acquired INTURN, a New York-based inventory management company. By early 2023, it was headquartered in California, had 275 people across the US, the Middle East, Europe and Asia, and said it had grown 100% year on year for 24 months.
In January 2023, it raised a $30 million Series C led by Avatar Growth Capital, with Sequoia and Alpha Wave Global (formerly Falcon Edge) joining. “At Mad Street Den, we’ve gone step by step,” Ashwini told YourStory, describing the road to a general AI platform. She said she wanted partners who could help “bring discipline to the scaling”.
A sale, and a quieter chapter
It turned out to be the company’s last reported funding round. In March 2025, Moneycontrol, followed by Entrackr, YourStory, Inc42 and The Morning Context, reported that M2P Fintech, a Chennai-based banking infrastructure company, was acquiring Mad Street Den in what Entrackr described as a distress sale. Reports put the value at roughly $10–15 million in cash and stock, while the Economic Times, cited by Inc42, put it at under $10 million. Mad Street Den had raised about $50 million in total.
Because Mad Street Den was registered outside India, the deal was structured as an asset purchase: M2P would take over its intellectual property, its existing contracts and its employees, and fold the Vue.ai platform into its banking technology, YourStory reported. The terms came out through people familiar with the deal rather than an announcement by the companies.
We could not find any public announcement of the founders’ roles after the deal. What remains on the record is the company itself: a decade-long AI business, built from Chennai, that sold to retailers on several continents and was led throughout by a CEO who chose design and people, not code, as her way into technology.
She had set out to bring AI to people “in a meaningful way”. She did that years before AI became the word on everyone’s lips, and she did it from the city where she grew up dancing.
Founder Journeys is a Sakhi Sangini series telling the stories of women who built businesses in India. This story is based on public interviews and reporting.
Sources: HerStory/YourStory (February 2015); YourStory (January 2015, September 2016, October 2016, January 2023, March 2025); TechCrunch (January 2015); FactorDaily (August 2016); Entrepreneur India (March 2018); Inc42 (September 2018, March 2025); VentureBeat (April 2019); AVCJ (January 2023); Entrackr (March 2025); The Morning Context (March 2025).
