Sonakshi Nathani: The Founder Who Scaled to $4.5M ARR Without Marketing Spend
Sonakshi Nathani has done something most SaaS founders talk about and very few pull off, building real revenue on product and word of mouth rather than paid acquisition.
She is Co-Founder and CEO of BIK (bik.ai) and Manifest AI, an agentic AI CRM for e-commerce backed by Y Combinator and Sequoia Capital (now Peak XV). Manifest AI was the company's first AI agent, functioning as a sales representative that sits on a brand's website, engages visitors, drives upsell, and handles the vast majority of support tickets. Brands including Lego, Durex, and Wonderchef use the platform, and Sonakshi now splits her time between Bangalore and New York.
She also talks about how to evaluate the right chatbot via the WIDGET framework.
Background – education and career
Sonakshi holds a B.Tech in Computer Science from IIIT Hyderabad and began her career as a software developer at Microsoft. She co-founded the company with Ashutosh Singla, originally building Bikayi with the ambition of becoming "Shopify for India," scaling it to millions of SMBs before making the decision to pivot the business toward a global e-commerce SaaS opportunity. That pivot, taken after a Series A, is one of the more instructive parts of her story.
3 key takeaways from the episode
Conversational commerce changes what a website is for. When an AI agent can answer intent-level questions, the traditional category-and-filter navigation model starts to look outdated.
Product-led growth is possible in India, but it demands ruthless focus. Growing without marketing spend means every friction point in the product is a growth problem.
Knowing when to pivot is a founder skill. Sonakshi is candid about pivoting after Series A, and what that decision cost and returned.
