Meet IIT Bombay Graduate Whose AI Just Replaced Drift, World's Most Famous Sales Chatbot



Most people building artificial intelligence today are chasing attention. Feeds that never end, chatbots that keep you typing, apps designed to make sure you never quite log off. Sachin Bhat had a different idea. What if the smartest use of AI was not to hold onto people's time, but to hand it back to them? 

Effective enterprise sales conversations demand both conversational and behavioural accuracy. Beyond generating responses, an AI agent must make real-time operational decisions, knowing precisely when to speak, pause, display slides, intervene, or coordinate quietly with the host team. Crucially, there is zero tolerance for latency. Every turn, action, and response must match human speed and any awkward pauses or unpolished AI experiments can immediately derail a deal.

From a childhood spent thinking several moves ahead on a chessboard to a career spent solving the hardest, least glamorous problems in AI, Bhat's path has been less about chasing hype and more about quietly building things that actually work when it counts. This is that story.

Previously, AI voice agents were mere scripts with a face. Sachin Bhat, an IIT Bombay alumnus from Dharwad, Karnataka, successfully deployed lifelike AI avatars into live enterprise sales meetings, that were, later implemented by giants like HubSpot, Nutanix, and Boston Dynamics. At just fourteen, Bhat won gold in the National School Games in Delhi, a small-town kid outplaying the country's best young minds. What stayed with him was not the trophy. It was the thinking behind it.

Bhat’s journey to solving what everyone else merely demoed is rooted in a decade-long path through the defining institutions of Silicon Valley. Chess taught him that every game, like every startup, is different. There is no fixed playbook. He learnt that each startup is unique and the aim should be not to win but to stay in the game and learn along the way, making mistakes and starting over again.

After his initial education in Karnataka, Sachin went to study Engineering Physics at IIT Bombay, where he co-authored a paper in The European Physical Journal B that continues to be cited over a decade later. This itself was an early signal suggesting his genuine curiosity about how systems work, whether in physics or, eventually, in the messy, human world of enterprise software.

Building the First Wave and moving on to Solve the Bigger Problem

After IIT Bombay, Bhat moved to the United States, stepping into Silicon Valley at a moment when artificial intelligence was still mostly hype. Bhat’s career progressed through three distinct chapters. In 2017, he co-founded Scribe, where he built AI systems that autonomously read, classified, and acted on sales conversations across email, CRMs, and calendars, thus pioneering the category now known as the ‘AI SDR’. Scribe demonstrated rapid market traction, reaching approximately $400,000 in annual recurring revenue within just five months of launch, fast enough that Rippling acquired the company in 2019.

At Rippling, Sachin built and led a ten-engineer team from the ground up to build its flagship Professional Employer Organization (PEO) product. Launched in 2020 with a public endorsement from Sam Altman during its launch, the product turned co-employment, a $200-billion industry previously run on manual back-office labour, into automated software. Bhat serves as the lead inventor on the U.S. patents behind its multi-tenant architecture. He then stepped up to lead a 70-plus engineer organisation spanning more than 30 product lines, and took charge of expanding Rippling into over 50 countries in under eight months. Today, those product lines generate more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue, with a retention rate of 99.5 percent, numbers most enterprise software companies would consider a dream outcome.

By the time Bhat co-founded 1mind as Chief Technology Officer, he had already lived through two waves of AI up close, and he knew exactly where the gap was. Though everyone was building chatbots and calling them products, the moment you needed them to actually do something, they fell apart.

So, 1mind today builds multimodal AI ‘superhumans’ life-like avatars that join video calls with a face and a voice to speak for themselves. In a room where a million worth a deal can hinge on a single awkward pause, this AI has to move at human speed, every single time. Under his technical leadership, 1mind has raised $40 million from Battery Ventures and Primary Venture Partners at a $180-million valuation, serving over 60 enterprise clients. When software giants Clari and Salesloft decided to retire Drift, once the most recognised sales chatbot in the world, they picked 1mind as its official successor, a strong signal of where the industry believes this technology is heading.

Keeping One Foot in India

Today, 1mind runs a dedicated engineering team in Bengaluru, the city Bhat's parents live now and he call home. There's something quietly full circle about that where a founder who grew up playing chess in small-town Karnataka now building some of the most advanced AI in the world, with a piece of that work rooted back in India.

Beyond 1mind, Bhat scouts promising startups for Andreessen Horowitz, sits on the board of AI healthcare company Aware Health, and has judged InOut, one of India's largest community hackathons, staying closely connected to the country's next generation of builders. From early email automation to enterprise scale and now interactive video avatars, Bhat’s career reflects an ongoing evolution toward making artificial intelligence a truly functional participant in global business.