An Entrance Exam That Opened Every Door That Followed
For millions of Indian families, the road to the Indian Institutes of Technology is treated as a defining, almost mythologized rite of passage — years of preparation compressed into a single, brutally competitive entrance examination. For Ashutosh Garg, clearing that exam and securing admission to IIT Delhi became, in his own retrospective account, the single most consequential milestone of his early life. 'Getting into IIT Delhi was a defining moment for me,' Garg has said, reflecting on his journey in a 2026 interview with Authority Magazine. 'Looking back, IIT opened doors that changed the trajectory of my career.'
Garg completed his BTech at IIT Delhi before heading to the United States for a PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, focused on machine learning — a field that, at the time, remained a relatively obscure academic specialization rather than the industry-defining discipline it has since become. His PhD thesis earned him the outstanding thesis award at UIUC, and his early research output, which would eventually total more than 6,000 research citations, 50-plus patents, and over 35 peer-reviewed publications, marked him early on as a genuine authority in the field of machine learning, long before that expertise became broadly commercially valuable.
A Decade Inside Big Tech's Search and Personalization Engines
Garg's early professional career took him through two of the most technically demanding research environments in the industry: IBM Research and Google, where he led search and personalization efforts. That combination — deep academic grounding in machine learning theory, paired with hands-on, large-scale industry experience building search and recommendation systems used by hundreds of millions of people — gave Garg an unusually complete toolkit heading into his first entrepreneurial venture.
Building the First Unicorn: Bloomreach
In 2009, after roughly four years at Google, Garg left to co-found Bloomreach, applying his machine learning and search expertise to a very specific commercial problem: helping e-commerce companies deliver better, AI-personalized digital experiences to their customers. Garg served as CTO, and later CEO, steering the company through years of steady, compounding growth. Bloomreach went on to raise more than $450 million in venture funding and was eventually valued at $2.2 billion — officially making it a unicorn, and making Garg, on his very first attempt as a founder, part of an elite, small group of entrepreneurs who have built a billion-dollar company from scratch.
Walking Away From a Winning Company to Start Over
It is one thing to build a single unicorn. It is a genuinely rare decision to walk away from a thriving, well-capitalized company you built and lead, in order to start something entirely new, with no guarantee of repeating that success. Halfway through Bloomreach's journey — roughly around 2016 — Garg made exactly that choice, stepping away from the company he had spent years building to found Eightfold.ai. According to accounts of his decision, when Garg left Bloomreach he did not even have a fully clear idea of precisely what he was going to build next; he simply knew he wanted more impact, and was willing to accept the risk and uncertainty of starting again from zero in order to pursue it.
The Second Unicorn: Fixing How the World Hires
Eightfold.ai set out to tackle a problem that Garg has framed, consistently and publicly, in deeply personal, almost moral terms: ensuring that every person has access to the right career based on their actual capabilities, rather than their existing network or connections. Eightfold built what it calls a 'Talent Intelligence Platform' — an AI system designed to help large organizations identify, hire, retain, and internally mobilize talent more fairly and more effectively than traditional resume-screening and recruiting processes typically allow.
The company's growth mirrored, and eventually eclipsed, the pace Garg had achieved at Bloomreach. Eightfold scaled from roughly $1 million to $12 million in annual recurring revenue within two years, and in 2021, raised $220 million from SoftBank at a valuation of $2.1 billion, officially making Eightfold Garg's second unicorn — an extraordinarily rare achievement, accomplished by very few technology founders anywhere in the world, let alone twice by the same person within a single decade.
"I Also Benefited From the Broader Immigrant Community"
In his own reflections on what made this repeated success possible, Garg has been notably candid about the role of community and mentorship rather than pure individual brilliance. 'My PhD advisors at the University of Illinois gave me the freedom to work on difficult problems in AI long before the field became mainstream,' he has said. 'My co-founders, early investors, and colleagues believed in ideas that were often unproven at the time. That kind of trust can have a profound impact on a person's confidence and willingness to take risks.' He has also spoken directly about the immigrant experience shaping his resilience: 'I also benefited from the broader immigrant community in Silicon Valley. When you move to a new country, you're rebuilding your network and your life from scratch. There's a shared understanding among people who have gone through that experience, and I've always appreciated the support and encouragement that comes with it.'
Betting on Agentic AI With a New Company: Viven
Rather than resting on the success of two unicorns, Garg has continued building. Alongside his ongoing leadership at Eightfold, he has co-founded Viven, a company focused on building AI-powered 'digital twins' for the enterprise — an emerging frontier in agentic AI that aims to model and replicate specific expertise and institutional knowledge within organizations. It reflects a consistent pattern across Garg's career: rather than treating a successful exit or a stable valuation as a finish line, he has repeatedly used each company as a launchpad toward a more ambitious, more difficult version of the same underlying mission — using AI to make talent and work fairer, smarter, and more accessible.
Leadership Lessons From a Two-Time Founder
Garg has increasingly used his platform to speak about how AI is reshaping leadership itself, not just hiring. In a 2026 feature, he argued that effective AI-first leadership requires leaders to let go of granular control — shifting from micromanaging individual decisions toward orchestrating overall direction, and trusting AI systems to handle data processing, task execution, and optimization so that human leaders can focus their energy on creativity, empathy, and strategic thinking. He has also argued that AI is fundamentally breaking work down from static job titles and rigid organizational hierarchies into fluid, skills-based tasks, enabling dynamic teams to form organically around specific problems rather than being permanently locked into fixed roles — a vision of the future of work directly informed by his two decades building AI systems designed to understand human skill and potential at scale.
The Statistical Rarity of Building Two Unicorns
It is worth putting Garg's achievement in proper statistical context, because the scale of what he has accomplished can be easy to understate in a media landscape saturated with unicorn headlines. Of the tens of thousands of venture-backed startups founded in the United States each year, only a small fraction ever reach a billion-dollar valuation at all. The number of individual founders who have built two entirely separate companies, in two different problem domains, that each independently reached unicorn status, is a group small enough to count on both hands within any given technology era. Garg's achievement is made even more notable by the fact that Bloomreach and Eightfold address genuinely distinct markets — e-commerce personalization and enterprise talent management — rather than simply iterating on the same underlying product category twice, which would represent a comparatively less difficult, though still impressive, repeat-founder pattern.
Turning Personal Conviction Into Company Culture
Garg's framing of Eightfold's mission — ensuring people get the right career based on capabilities rather than connections — is not merely a marketing slogan; colleagues and interviewers who have spent time with him consistently describe it as a conviction that shapes concrete product decisions inside the company, from how Eightfold's algorithms are designed to surface qualified candidates who might otherwise be filtered out by traditional keyword-based resume screening, to how the company talks publicly about reducing bias in hiring processes. That translation of a founder's personal, often deeply autobiographical conviction — shaped by his own experience rebuilding a career and a network from scratch as an immigrant in a new country — into the literal architecture of a company's core product is a pattern that recurs across many of the most successful immigrant-founded technology companies, where the problem being solved is never entirely abstract to the person who built the solution.
How SoftBank's $220 Million Bet Reshaped Eightfold's Trajectory
SoftBank's decision to lead a $220 million investment into Eightfold at a $2.1 billion valuation in 2021 carried particular significance beyond the headline number, arriving at a moment when SoftBank's Vision Fund had already developed a reputation, following several high-profile portfolio setbacks, for occasionally prioritizing narrative and scale over fundamentals. That SoftBank chose Eightfold as one of its enterprise AI bets reflected genuine conviction in the underlying talent intelligence market opportunity, and in Garg's specific ability to execute against it, given his already-proven track record building and scaling Bloomreach to a multi-billion-dollar outcome. The capital injection allowed Eightfold to aggressively expand its enterprise sales and customer success operations at a moment when large global employers, grappling with pandemic-driven workforce disruption and the accelerating shift toward skills-based hiring, were unusually receptive to rethinking how they identified and developed talent — timing that Garg has since credited as a significant, if partly fortunate, accelerant to Eightfold's growth trajectory during that period.
Prolific Beyond the Boardroom: A Researcher Who Never Stopped Publishing
Even as he has built and scaled two separate unicorn companies, Garg has maintained an unusually active output of formal research and intellectual property, accumulating more than 6,000 research citations, over 50 patents, and more than 35 peer-reviewed publications across his career — a body of technical work that would represent a full, distinguished career for most academic researchers who never leave the university system at all. That continued output reflects something distinctive about how Garg has approached entrepreneurship: not as a departure from serious technical research, but as a direct, applied extension of it, treating each of his companies as a large-scale laboratory for testing machine learning ideas against real-world commercial problems, at a scale and with a level of resourcing that pure academic research rarely affords.
A Rare Second Act Undertaken Without Financial Necessity
It is worth emphasizing that Garg's decision to found Eightfold came not from financial necessity but from a deliberate, almost restless choice to pursue a harder mission after already achieving significant personal and professional success at Bloomreach. Many successful founders, once they have achieved a comfortable financial outcome from a first company, choose to transition into angel investing, board advisory roles, or philanthropy rather than absorb the very real personal and professional risk of starting an entirely new company from zero. Garg's choice to do exactly that — twice — reflects a specific kind of restless, mission-oriented ambition that appears to run through much of his public commentary about immigrant resilience and the shared experience of rebuilding a life and a network from scratch in a new country.
A Model of Compounding, Mission-Driven Founder Success
Ashutosh Garg's career stands out within the broader landscape of Indian-American technology entrepreneurship precisely because of its rare, repeated success across two entirely distinct companies, built roughly a decade apart, each independently reaching unicorn status. It is a story that resists easy, single-moment mythologizing — there is no single viral tweet, no single narrow miss, no single dramatic pivot. Instead, there is a consistent, decades-long thread: a formative IIT Delhi education, a rigorous machine learning PhD, deep technical grounding inside Google and IBM, and then two separate, deliberate decisions to walk away from stability in pursuit of a larger, more difficult mission — first fixing e-commerce personalization, and then fixing how the entire world identifies, hires, and develops human talent. For the Indian and NRI entrepreneurial community, Garg's journey offers a powerful lesson: that building one unicorn can be extraordinary, but building a second, entirely different one, driven by a consistent underlying mission of fairness and opportunity, is what turns a successful founder into a genuinely influential one, whose ideas continue shaping how millions of people around the world find and grow in their careers. Few founders anywhere have paired that level of repeated commercial success with such a consistently articulated social mission.
As the global labor market continues its shift toward skills-based hiring and AI-mediated career mobility, the underlying thesis Garg has pursued across two separate companies — that fairer access to opportunity is both a moral imperative and a genuinely scalable business — appears increasingly prescient, positioning him as one of the more consistently mission-driven repeat founders in the current generation of Indian-American technology leaders.
