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Get MoreShilpa Karkeraa’s Journey: From Startup Struggles to Tech Innovation.
Introduction
Today we have Shilpa Karkeraa with us. She is the Group CEO at Myraa Technologies, which is an AI and blockchain company having offices in 15 countries and serving 11 industrial segments. She’s also the CEO at Floc Care, an AI-powered healthcare communication platform that focuses on improving patient awareness through structured, doctor-led content delivery.
She is also a Community Leader, a Global Top 20 Goldman Sachs Fellowship recipient, a published author on blockchain, and a global technology speaker. She’s a woman entrepreneur from India, currently based in Singapore, and that is the reason we are having this podcast online today.
Shilpa explains that the urge to build was always innate in her. She identifies herself as a builder—someone who loves to create. According to her, entrepreneurship offered the perfect canvas to build, share, and make an impact.
She recalls her college days as an incubation space before the word even became popular. She and her peers built robotic tracks and electronic gadgets, fostering both innovation and community. After graduation, she wanted to start her own company, but her father advised her to first understand business economics.
Shilpa shares that she gained valuable experience working in a Bay Area startup, where she led a team of 25 engineers and worked on cutting-edge AI algorithms. Later, she ventured into financial tech, developing trading engines and platforms that served over million users simultaneously.
Her global journey began when she moved to Singapore as a Principal Web Architect, scaling startup operations across Asia. She proudly notes that she secured two clients even before officially registering her company, which led to the founding of Myraa Technologies in 2016.
Were there any setbacks in the early days of Myraa or before?
Shilpa candidly shares that not everything went as planned. In her engineering days, she had built an eye-tracking product designed for directional headlights in cars—a solution she hoped to commercialize with BMW. Although the product received recognition, it never reached BMW. She reflects that the failure to commercialize the innovation deeply affected her as a creator.
She adds that this experience taught her an important lesson: building something incredible isn’t enough; ensuring the right people know about it is equally critical. This realization continues to drive her to make sure her team’s work gets noticed.
Shilpa recalls the early days of building Myraa during her time working in Singapore. She shares that the urge to build something of her own was strong, and she used her lunch breaks and evenings after work to nurture that dream. She would often rush to the National Library of Singapore, which she affectionately refers to as her “garage,” to work on her startup ideas. These hours were spent researching, writing outbound emails, understanding user needs, and shaping the vision for what would become Myraa Technologies.
She explains that Myraa was born out of a need to solve real, practical problems using technology. It started as a technical solutions company, but even before its formal registration, she had managed to close contracts with two clients. That moment of validation, she notes, gave her both the confidence and foundation to launch the company officially in 2016.
Unlike many startups that chase early-stage funding, Shilpa emphasizes that Myraa was built through revenue generation from the beginning. She takes pride in the fact that the company scaled without external funding, allowing it to stay true to its values and mission. This approach, according to her, gave them the flexibility to choose projects that aligned with their principles rather than chasing investor-driven goals.
She adds that this self-sustaining model helped Myraa grow gradually but with a solid foundation, eventually transforming it from a consulting firm into a company offering both solutions and proprietary products across multiple industries.
Shilpa explains that Myraa Technologies started as an AI solutions company primarily serving the finance industry. The first few solutions were focused on wealth management, helping financial institutions with automated investment recommendations. The company later worked with NBFCs to design intelligent systems for loan processing, incentive plans, and customer engagement.
She shares that Myraa’s success in the financial sector helped it branch out into 11 other industries including oil and gas, maritime, manufacturing, aviation, and gaming. One of their strengths has been creating AI-driven systems that take on repetitive, strenuous, and often hazardous tasks that humans either avoid or find difficult to sustain. According to Shilpa, this not only increases efficiency but also opens the door to more inclusive workplaces by enabling remote and safe operations.
She further mentions that their solutions today go beyond services and extend into proprietary AI products. For example, in the healthcare sector, Myraa has developed tools that assist hospitals in improving operational efficiency, quality of care, and patient engagement.
Shilpa emphasizes that Myraa’s growth has always been driven by listening to real-world pain points and building technology that can scale to address them. Whether it’s in healthcare, arts, gaming, or industrial sectors, the goal has always been to solve high-impact problems with measurable value.
She proudly states that today, Myraa stands not just as a solutions provider but as a product company with deep expertise across a broad spectrum of use cases—from safety compliance in factories to intelligent patient communication tools in hospitals.
Was the company started in Singapore?
Shilpa cracked her early customers in Singapore & USA and adds that her roots in India also played a crucial role. While Singapore remains the headquarters, she mentions that the company has registered office in Mumbai, India, UAE & US. She notes having set up a 4000 square-foot innovation space in Mangalore prior to the pandemic and emphasizes that Myraa has evolved into a globally inclusive, hybrid workplace.
What are the advantages of having global offices?
Shilpa highlights the operational resilience and cultural balance achieved through having global offices. She points out how different teams can maintain business continuity during regional holidays and festivals. According to her, this diversity creates a fault-tolerant and high-energy work environment.
When asked how she approaches innovation, Shilpa answers that it all starts with the consumer. She explains that identifying a meaningful problem begins with noticing a pain point—that is not just individual but repeatable across many users. “It can’t just be one person’s issue at the initial stage” she clarifies, “it has to be something many people face.”
She adds that not all challenges are worth solving with large-scale innovation. If a problem can be resolved with a ₹10 solution, there is no reason to build a million-dollar product around it. She believes the value added by the solution must justify its development cost and effort.
At Myraa Technologies, innovation is customer-led. Shilpa shares that most of the company’s work comes not from cold calls or aggressive sales but from inbound requests. “We don’t do outbound sales,” she asserts. Instead, they listen closely when people come to them with recurring issues. That’s their cue to act.
She cites the healthcare sector as an example. According to her, situations where doctors are overburdened, appointments are too short, and patients leave with unresolved doubts are not isolated cases. These are widespread and painful experiences—and thus ripe for innovation.
For Shilpa, the litmus test is whether the problem is relatable, repeatable, and worth solving with technology. She emphasizes that innovation at Myraa is never speculative. It is grounded in real feedback, validated need, and the potential to scale.
Shilpa explains that motivation across such a diverse team comes from purpose. “If the pain point is big enough and relatable enough,” she says, “people show up not just to build software but to be part of the impact.”
She adds that nobody wants to work on something transactional—like a dashboard that will be forgotten in a month. “I’m the first one who will walk out of a boring meeting if it’s not impactful,” she laughs.
Instead, she has cultivated a team culture where every member, regardless of geography, constantly asks “Why are we doing this?” She considers this internal questioning a strength, not a threat. If the team can’t answer that question meaningfully, the project doesn’t proceed.
According to her, the mission at Myraa—of solving real problems with social and economic impact—is what keeps the global team united and motivated.
Hiring as per Shilpa is an extremely crucial element that needs to be served responsibly. Especially when you are making life impacting products – where an engineering flaw has no room.
She elaborates that when a company is performing well and the demand grows, the pressure to rush hiring increases—and that’s exactly when finding the right people becomes tough. She calls it a consistent pain point that the HR industry has been trying to solve forever.
She then breaks the journey down into two distinct parts: the first four years, and now going into nine years. She recalls that in the initial four years, hiring didn’t really work the way they wanted. The team was still exploring: What’s the culture? What kind of hiring process works? They made both good and bad hires—it was all part of the learning process.
Now, with nearly nine years of experience and a strong foundational team, she says that the hiring process has become automatically culturally aligned. The early team members have shaped a strong cultural foundation that naturally spreads to new hires, making it easier to evaluate fit.
Shilpa emphasizes that culture at Myraa is not built overnight—it was shaped by years of experimentation and refinement. She shares that during the early years, the company would accept almost any customer, without questioning whether the problem aligned with their deeper purpose. But things changed.
She notes, “Now we have a very high curative filter—whether this is making impact or not.” With that clarity, everyone in the company is aligned not just to the work itself but to the purpose behind the work.
This part of her journey, Shilpa says, is extremely personal. She shares that she was a caregiver for her mother for 11 years, during which her mother survived chronic kidney failure. “I almost lost her when I was 18,” she recalls emotionally, “but she fought back.”
She says everything she is today is because of her mother’s resilience. Her mother even designed the original logo of the company while undergoing treatment. Shilpa believes that it was those years of fighting life-and-death battles with her mother that shaped her own resilience as an entrepreneur.
She also mentions that her extended family runs hospitals, which exposed her to the operational side of healthcare. “Everyone wants to serve,” she says, “but the infrastructure is overloaded and fragmented.”
Through this dual lens—as a family caregiver and a systems thinker—Shilpa became obsessed with solving problems in healthcare. She sees healthcare awareness as one of the biggest missing links in India.
“In this information age, not getting the right health guidance is a failure of technology,” she argues. While we get endless choices for food delivery and entertainment, she notes, we don’t have clarity or options when it comes to serious medical decisions.
That’s where her second company, FlocCare, comes in—designed to bridge this awareness gap.
Shilpa explains that Floc Care is an AI platform. It functions as a content engine built specifically for doctors to communicate to patients. Being patient centric, we help medical professionals to send personalized healthcare information to their patients—either before or after a consultation based on patient needs.
She shares that the platform works through WhatsApp or social media, and is designed to help the doctor say things like, “This is what you should expect after dialysis,” or “These are the three things to do post-surgery,” or “These are the FAQs—don’t panic.” It helps structure communication that doctors may not have the time to repeat or reinforce in short consultations.
She emphasizes that the content never bypasses the doctor. “We are not here to send one lakh Google links to the patient,” she says. The doctor remains in control and chooses what to send and when. Floc Care merely enables that communication in a structured, human, and scalable way.
Is Floc Care a web application or an app?
In response to this, Shilpa clarifies that Floc Care is not a patient app and not something that patients log into. Rather, it is a content engine or backend platform. It can work in a hospital group, across multiple doctors, and run in the background.
She reiterates that patients receive content through familiar channels like WhatsApp, but they don’t directly engage with the app or platform itself. It is always the doctor who decides the content and initiates the communication.
Is it for medical professionals? And will it stay that way?
Shilpa affirms that the platform is for medical professionals to be patient centric & enabling scaled healthcare impact. She emphasizes that the mission of Floc Care is to enable doctors to communicate better.
She adds that the content comes from doctors, caregivers, or medical authorities, and then it is formatted and delivered through the platform. The aim is to scale awareness, not advice. It’s a tool that helps doctors educate without taking time away from consultations.
III. How does this system fit into India’s healthcare context?
Shilpa acknowledges that in India, once a doctor prescribes something, patients often don’t question it. The power dynamic makes it hard for patients to seek clarity or second opinions.
She believes that Floc Care fills this gap, not by challenging the doctor’s role, but by allowing structured communication to continue after the appointment. The platform can help doctors easily pass along post-care instructions, advice, or educational material, which otherwise gets lost.
She also points out that many senior doctors carry vast knowledge but don’t have the bandwidth to pass it down. Floc Care helps capture that knowledge and distribute it at scale, so that both patients and junior professionals can benefit from it.
Additionally, she reflects on how international medical content takes years to reach India in usable form. Floc Care, she says, helps bridge that delay by localizing and distributing curated awareness content in multiple languages, in formats patients can understand.
Shilpa shares that she is very proud of a product called Myraa Lens. She explains that this product ensures workplace safety, particularly in industrial engineering setups like factories, oil and gas plants, ships, and the maritime sector.
She elaborates that the product automates surveillance camera systems for safety protocols, quality inspection, and supervisory automation. Shilpa states that they’ve applied this in areas like aircraft assembly, where the technology ensures there are no gas leaks, which, if undetected, could lead to plant shutdowns and significant financial losses.
She adds that traditionally in maritime sectors, women couldn’t participate due to the dangers involved. But now, with Myraa Lens and its AI-based supervision tools, women can actively participate. For example, instead of climbing tall structures to inspect valves, female technicians can deploy drones, or even let the AI cameras handle the inspection.
Shilpa emphasizes that Myraa Lens is making workplaces safer, more inclusive, and gender-equitable.
Do these AI solutions also apply to office spaces?
In response, Shilpa explains that yes, Myraa’s technologies are not limited to factories or industrial plants. She confirms that their AI products can be adapted for office setups as well.
She shares an example: they have implemented solutions where the system checks whether someone has their ID card or safety gear before entering restricted zones—using camera-based AI instead of manual supervision.
Shilpa clarifies that while these may seem like minor features, they add up to larger safety and compliance wins, especially in hybrid workplaces or co-working spaces where manual tracking becomes inefficient.
Shilpa shares that this is one of her favorite questions to answer, though the method might sound unusual. She recalls advice from her mentor at IIM Ahmedabad, who once told her: “Stop solving too many problems. Solve the ones that can scale—but do it simply.” He had compared a great solution to selling a towel: “It should be easy to use, easy to buy, and easy to store.”
She admits that it sounded odd at first, but the lesson stayed with her. A solution, no matter how innovative, should not overwhelm the customer. It should be useful and non-intrusive—as simple as a towel.
Shilpa explains that when it comes to innovation at Myraa, the team follows a design-thinking approach. They first simplify the pain point and then isolate one specific problem that is most worth solving. From there, they focus on building just one hero feature—something worthy of IP protection, valuable enough for mass adoption, and simple enough to explain.
She emphasizes that too many features can confuse users. Referencing WhatsApp, she notes how it scaled massively by first solving just one problem—messaging.
Shilpa says her process is scientific. She shares that for Floc Care, she conducted almost 50 customer interviews. Through those interviews, she looked for the repeatable pain point and always followed up with two critical questions:
Would you pay for this?
How much would you pay for this?
She notes that while not every startup can do 50 interviews, you can always find a community. She shares that in her case, she relied on her community of women founders, where these problems would often come up in conversation.
She then brings in a principle she deeply values:
“There’s one thing I tell everyone in my team: the idea has to pass the Mom’s Test.”
She explains this means—can you explain this problem and its solution to your mother without using jargon? If yes, then it’s ready to be built.
She concludes by saying that you must be able to explain the problem in human language before jumping to solve it. That clarity is what makes a product scalable and meaningful.
Shilpa begins by stating that intellectual property is the most important part of being a creator. She emphasizes that at Myraa, they have consistently built things that hadn’t existed in the market, especially in the early four years of their journey.
She explains that even before technologies like GPT-2 became popular, her team was already working on their own LLMs (Large Language Models), and they still continue to do so.
She adds that the key is to ensure that all of that creation is formalized into a tangible form—whether as a trademark, utility patent, design patent, or system architecture.
However, she cautions that IP protection doesn’t always have to happen on Day 1. She advises that first, the idea should be tested in the market, and once there’s validation, that’s when entrepreneurs should start thinking about safeguarding trade secrets and formalizing them into intellectual property.
Shilpa also shares a personal practice from the early stage of her career—she didn’t have the money to file patents, so she used to study existing patent fights between giants like Apple and Samsung. She read their legal disputes to understand where IP made billions and how it influenced business decisions.
She says that for anyone starting out, studying patents should be like reading the newspaper—a daily habit. Even if you can’t file one yet, you should be consciously aware of your own trade secrets, even while you’re building a product.
She concludes by saying that once the idea is ready to scale, you can always distribute between licensing, trademarks, and patents with a thoughtful strategy. But start early by identifying what should remain a trade secret and what can be shared with the world through a patent.
Shilpa smiles and shares that it’s a really nice question. She explains that the name Myraa is derived from her great-grandmother’s name, “Myre.” Her great-grandmother had to be entrepreneurial given the hard times, and Shilpa wanted to celebrate her legacy.
She reveals that she comes from a family of matriarchs, where the women have always been strong and resilient. These women have faced hardships and fought battles that paved the way for her success today.
She says that whenever she needs strength, the name “Myraa” reminds her of the struggles and victories of the women in her lineage. It is, as she puts it, a tribute to her great-grandmother and all the strong women in her family who made it possible for her to stand where she is now.
Shilpa answers this question with pride, stating that bootstrapping was an intentional and empowering choice. She shares that, for her, it was crucial to first prove herself to herself before proving anything to others. She wanted to see whether her company could survive and thrive on its own without depending on external capital.
She believes this approach gave her a powerful edge in negotiation, especially during difficult times. She explains, “Before taking anyone else’s money or trust, I had to feel trusted with my own leadership journey.”
As the company grew, so did the desire for freedom—freedom to experiment, to discover what she truly loved solving, and to build without investor constraints. During the third and fourth year, even though the company could have raised funds, she chose not to, because she wanted to build products that she fell in love with. FlocCare was one such product that has been very close to heart.
She reflects, “If I don’t truly love the product, I cannot talk about it for 10 years. And if that’s the case, the company will die.” This, she says, was another reason not to pitch to investors too early.
However, she acknowledges that things have evolved. She shares that FlocCare has now raised funding for healthcare impact, where the problem is bigger than her own freedom. It’s a problem that affects many, and deserves a solution at scale.
Even now, though, she emphasizes that they are careful and responsible with how they spend money. Having spent years in a bootstrapped culture, her team remains grounded. They don’t burn cash mindlessly, because they’ve seen how damaging that can be. She says, “Somewhere in the world, someone doesn’t have food to eat—we cannot be frivolous just because we raised funds.”
Finally, she states that the ethos and foundations built through bootstrapping are what will allow Myraa to last 100 or even 200 years. She does not believe a typical startup bubble built on day-one external funding could have given that kind of longevity and sustainability
Shilpa begins by stressing the value of college time. She calls it a “sponsored time”—whether through a loan or family support, it’s still a relatively safe space to experiment and learn. She advises students to leverage college as a playground for trying out different things.
She shares that students often limit themselves to only one focus—like exams—but that reduces their capacity to explore. According to her, entrepreneurship begins in the heart, and college is the lowest-cost and lowest-risk environment to act like an entrepreneur.
To those who have already started working professionally, she offers another perspective: think like an entrepreneur inside your organization. She encourages people to be a self-starter, act as if they are already two levels above their current position, and communicate their initiatives clearly.
She emphasizes that entrepreneurship is not only about building businesses—it’s about coordinating, influencing, communicating, and managing finances. These qualities can be demonstrated within a job as well.
Lastly, she strongly recommends side hustles. For those working 9-to-5, she suggests picking one small thing to do outside office hours that adds to personal growth, income, or skills. That one small effort, she says, might later turn into a full-time venture.