Swapnika Nag is the co-founder and CEO of Periskope, the platform that automates WhatsApp operations for businesses. Periskope serves over 5,000 businesses across about 100 countries, and India makes up roughly 40% of its business.
While most WhatsApp companies built for marketing broadcasts and customer support, Periskope went after the messier problem: the groups, sales chats and day-to-day operations that companies actually run on WhatsApp.
Today, Swapnika is also building Perisclaw, an AI executive assistant that works inside your own WhatsApp number. It tracks the promises buried in group chats, follows up on your behalf, coordinates meetings and connects with email, Drive, Google Sheets, Notion and Calendar. About 70% of its users found it through word of mouth, from founders and investors to traditional traders in Kolkata’s business community.
It enters a personal AI agent market that has suddenly got crowded, with Meta’s Muse and Instinct both racing to build assistants that act on your behalf. Perisclaw’s difference is where it lives: on the number you already use, inside the groups you already run.
Periskope has been profitable from its first year and runs with a team of just 12. That makes Swapnika one of the clearest voices on a question most AI companies are still working out: what does it take to stay relevant when anyone can build a good product fast?
Background & Journey
Swapnika studied Engineering Physics at IIT (BHU) Varanasi and then did her PGDM at IIM Bangalore. She spent close to five years at McKinsey & Company, rising to Engagement Manager across pharma, medtech and financial services. She has described it as the place where she learnt to figure things out fast. She then moved to Tata CLiQ, first as Head of Corporate Projects and then as Chief Product Officer of Tata CLiQ Fashion.
Her first startup, Hashmail, built communication tools for the Web3 space. Within a year she recognised it as a vitamin, not a painkiller, and went looking for a deeper problem. She found it in her own WhatsApp, in messages from founders struggling to manage thousands of noisy client groups. In August 2023, the team built a working version of Periskope in three days, and a paying customer signed up almost immediately. She builds the company with her co-founder and husband. They split the final calls simply: tech is his, and customers and sales are hers.
On Dilse Omni Talks
Swapnika Nag recently appeared on Dilse Omni Talks with host Saurabh Agrawal, where the conversation explored “Why WhatsApp has quietly become the operating system of the world , and what personal AI agents mean for how businesses and busy people get work done.”
3 Key Takeaways from the Episode
WhatsApp is not just a messaging app , it is how the world runs. Swapnika argues that the largest CRM in the world is not a software product but WhatsApp plus Google Sheets. Millions of businesses across India, the Middle East, Latin America and Southeast Asia run their operations on that combination. The opportunity lies in the operations, not the marketing messages.
Measure magic, habit and autonomy before revenue. For an AI product, Swapnika tracks three things: how quickly users reach a “wow” moment, how often they come back, and whether they trust the agent to run jobs on its own. Users who let Perisclaw run tasks independently convert at 58%, compared with 17% for those who only chat with it. Trust is what converts. It is the same shift every personal AI agent, from Muse to Instinct, is now chasing: from chatting to delegating.
When anyone can build fast, relevance is the real moat. A good product built quickly is no longer an advantage on its own. Swapnika’s bet is on vertical depth: an assistant built to understand messy work, not a general assistant that books your flights, the space Meta’s Muse and Instinct are now competing for. That knowledge compounds over time in a way a general-purpose tool cannot easily copy.
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