Samyak Jain graduated from IIT Delhi, built MyWays.ai for 200,000 students, and then in 2022 co-founded Zeko AI with Tanvi Jain to solve enterprise hiring from its root. Backed by AUM Ventures, IIMA Ventures, and RTAF, Zeko AI has been crowned a global winner at India AI Impact Summit 2026 and is redefining how large enterprises find their best people.
In November 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT. Within days, the world's most searched question was: will AI take my job?
Samyak Jain, 28, sitting in Gurugram, was asking a different question entirely.
Not what will AI replace — but what has been broken for years that AI could finally fix?
His answer was hiring. And he got to work.
The Origin — 200,000 Students, Five Years in Recruitment, and One Systemic Truth
• Samyak Jain is an IIT Delhi alumnus who started his first venture, MyWays.ai, while still in college and scaled it to 200,000 college students across India's top engineering institutions including IITs and NITs. MyWays.ai focused on helping fresh graduates get hired — and in doing so, it gave Samyak and his co-founder Tanvi Jain something far more valuable than early traction: five years of ground-level visibility into how broken enterprise recruitment truly was.
• “My co-founder, Tanvi, and I have been deeply engaged in the recruitment and talent evaluation space for over five years," Samyak explains. Through their work at MyWays.ai, they uncovered systemic inefficiencies in recruitment processes, especially in large organisations. The turning point came in 2022 when an internal incident further solidified the need for innovation. They had already built a very strong engine for evaluation of skills, and with the launch of LLMs, they were able to increase the scope very fast from fresher and tech-focused to beyond."
• The problem was structural, not human. Recruiters and hiring managers were misaligned. Thousands of resumes were generating very little clarity. Hiring cycles stretched across months. And the best candidates were getting lost in the noise. Zeko AI was built to end that.
The Strategic Genius — AI Agents That Upgrade Humans Instead of Replacing Them
• "We developed a proprietary layer to function along with LLMs, creating a product that conducts end-to-end interviews and builds talent pipelines," Samyak says. "This innovation has become the cornerstone of our mission to transform recruitment with AI technology. We can now achieve things that were not possible before."
• The platform works in three precise stages. Zeko AI scans thousands of candidate profiles with an accuracy that manual screening cannot match. It then conducts AI-led structured interviews, generating detailed candidate reports for each person assessed. Finally, it shortlists only the top three to four candidates for human decision-makers, who arrive at the final stage with clarity rather than confusion.
• Investor Chetan Mehta of AUM Ventures describes Zeko AI as an "India-centric innovation with global scalability," aligning with the growing demand for AI solutions in emerging talent hubs like India and the Middle East. CA Amit Singal of RTAF emphasises the "direct economic impact," positioning Zeko AI as a tool that reduces hiring costs and operational inefficiencies, framing recruitment more as an investment than a cost centre.
• What took months now takes days. And crucially, it takes days with measurably better outcomes.
The Global Recognition — Top Winner Across 50 Countries
• The world began to take notice. And in February 2026, it gave Zeko AI one of its most significant validations.
• Zeko AI was recognised among the global winners of the AI by HER challenge at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, emerging from a competitive field across 50 plus countries. The recognition came at a summit of unprecedented scale, with over 15,500 registrations, 4,600 plus formal applications, participation from 70 plus countries, and 900 plus startups exhibiting. Awards including grants of ₹25 lakh each were presented by Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Minister of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India.
• At 27, co-founder Tanvi Jain said: "AI in enterprises is no longer about automating recruitment. Large enterprises are rethinking how decisions are made. The future lies in structured intelligence, where data supports fairness, alignment, and long-term workforce strategy."
• Samyak added: "Enterprises today struggle with decision misalignment between HR, business units, and leadership, especially in people-heavy service sectors like ITes, BFSI, GCCs and logistics. Our vision is to embed organisation intelligence into workflows so that decision-making becomes measurable, aligned, and data-driven."
Scale, Numbers and Real-World Impact
• Zeko AI has been backed by AUM Ventures, RTAF, and IIMA Ventures. The platform has been ranked as a Top AI Product on Product Hunt and has demonstrated its technology at GITEX in Dubai, the GCC Talent Summit 2026, and the India AI Impact Summit. The company identified its ideal customer profile as an enterprise hiring ten plus people every month, allowing the team to allocate resources effectively and refine its offerings for committed, high-frequency hiring clients in ITes, BFSI, GCCs, and logistics.
• The vision Samyak and Tanvi are building toward extends far beyond a single platform feature. Zeko AI is moving from automating hiring to embedding organisation intelligence across enterprise workflows, making people decisions measurable, data-driven, and aligned at every level of the business.
The Business Lesson — The Biggest Opportunities Live Inside the Oldest, Most Ignored Problems
• The sharpest lesson from Zeko AI's journey is this: the most transformational AI companies are built by founders who understood the problem deeply before the technology arrived, not after.
• Samyak and Tanvi spent five years inside recruitment before they built Zeko AI. They knew where the misalignment was. They knew what recruiters were frustrated by. They knew what hiring managers were not getting. When LLMs arrived in 2022, they did not pivot to AI. They applied AI to a problem they had already spent years earning the right to solve.
• "We believe the company grows only if individuals within it grow," Samyak says of his leadership philosophy. "Good salaries and a strong brand are important, but trust and investment in people sustain an organisation during crises."
• AI did not replace recruiters. Zeko AI upgraded them. And that distinction, held clearly and built carefully, is what took two founders from a college campus in Delhi to a global stage in front of India's Union Minister of IT, competing against 900 startups from 50 countries and winning.
Sources: The Enterprise World, The Tribune / Tribune India, StartupNews.fyi, BusinessApac, IIM Udaipur Innovation Design Centre, LinkedIn
