The ongoing story of Prakshal Jain
Prakshal Jain, who grew up in a small town in India, was looking for a pathway to channel his talent and ambition. That’s how he found himself in Amherst, NY, in the fall of 2019. He was a University at Buffalo freshman.
In his four years at UB, Jain became heavily involved in the student entrepreneurship programing at UB CoLab, led by Hadar Borden (check out a recent Series B feature of Hadar here). He started three startups at UB, none of which took flight, but which grounded him in a sense of possibility through tech.
“I really love the place,” Jain said. “The community was inviting. I keep coming back to Buffalo, in that sense.”
Jain’s pathway ultimately brought him to San Franciso, where he scored an internship at Facebook, ultimately culminating in an engineering position on the Comet Frameworks Team and earning more than $300,000.
But Jain had also been contemplating the interaction between artifical intelligence and trust. He’s been asking the question, ‘How can a product as inherently unreliable as ChatGPT or Claude’ sustain a profitable, productive company?
“AI hallucinates, and when it hallucinates inside of a business, it can lead to catastrophic results,” he said.
Jain and his cofounder recently launched a new startup, Mitosis (paired with the attention-grabbing LinkedIn headline: “I quit my $300,000 job at Meta").
The young company is going to the market with several related products. The flagship is called Cortex, an intelligence layer for business data, and Yappy, an intuitive and secure interface that allows users to work with Cortex insights.
Long story short, the company's product suite aims to make AI something people can "reach, trust and actually enjoy."
More than 100,000 engaged with Mitosis following its launch, and cofounder Alex Morris called it “a decade in one product,” referring to his history in cybersecurity.
As the team seeks to raise funding for Mitosis and grow its user base, the pull of Buffalo remains strong with Jain. He recently judged a 43North Hackathon, and was also recently named to UB CoLab’s inaugural Advisory Board.
Jain’s keeping a close eye on the city, as a place he’d like to reinvest and to live (at least during the warmer months).
He thinks there’s something special in the interaction of community, lifestyle and talent. It’s a message he carries forward, even when not in Buffalo.
Mitosis is a young company, and like all early-stage software firms, it is fraught with risk. But all big companies were once small.
“There is a lot of talent in Buffalo for both technical and non-technical jobs, and if I can be a small part in bringing opportunity to those people, I’d like Mitosis to have a presence there,” he said. “A lot of original ideas come from places like Buffalo. It’s not a place where there’s a lot of groupthink.”
