Pandya launches AI venture as graduation nears

Vatsal Pandya, a data science major from Mumbai, India, came to the University of Nebraska–Lincoln at 18 as an international student. Through coursework, internships, and personal drive, he founded TasksMind, a company using AI to automate on-call processes for software engineers. TasksMind’s AI system investigates incidents, gathers context, proposes fixes, tests them, and opens pull requests autonomously within production systems. Unlike general AI tools, TasksMind is tailored to engineers' specific tech stacks and company environments. Pandya’s idea stemmed from observing repeated late-night troubleshooting challenges during his five internships. He conducted over 100 interviews with engineers at AWS and mid-sized tech companies to validate the problem, identifying a predictable but manual workflow. TasksMind’s solution replaces manual on-call work with AI agents, handling full lifecycle management of incidents. Pandya was selected for Dedalus Labs Break In program in San Francisco, where he secured backing from Forum Ventures and NVIDIA Inception, raising close to $500,000. He graduated in May and will relocate to San Francisco to continue building TasksMind full-time with co-founders Kashish Syed and Thang Do. Pandya emphasized the importance of balancing AI tools with hands-on technical understanding, citing encouragement from professors at Nebraska to use AI while maintaining deep knowledge of underlying systems. While traditional job offers were an option, the team chose full commitment to the startup. Pandya’s experience with delayed opportunities from Apple underscores the journey of prioritizing personal vision over immediate external opportunities.