It began in 2015 as a quiet thought — do something for the land we come from. What followed was a long, honest road: experiments, false starts, real businesses, a lot of failures, and a lot of learning. We never wanted to just run services — we wanted to ship a product that gives Uttarakhand its own digital identity.
It took more than money and time — intent, patience, experimentation, and a stubborn kind of faith.
And the hardest part can’t be measured — the suffering and the struggle on the road to glory live beyond any metric to trace.
Before building software, we ran actual businesses in the hills to understand the market, the people and the logistics first-hand.
Hospitality · since 2021
We turned an abandoned family home into a working homestay — to test whether travellers would really come to a remote Himalayan village. They did: steady bookings and enquiries, season after season.
Camping · experiment
We trialled a campsite on the ground with our own tents and kit, high in the meadows — to learn first-hand how guests, terrain, weather and the seasons really behave that far from the road.
Morning delivery · Haldwani
A morning grocery service in Haldwani — orders placed the night before, delivered fresh to the doorstep each morning. With no app at all, we were running about 40 orders a day before winding it down.
Travel & tours
We ran a full guided journey for a group from Bengaluru — Kedarnath, Auli and the Garhwal hills — handling the route, the stays and the logistics end to end. One run, then we stopped.
In 2014, I made a choice — to come home to India and build something of my own, on home ground. The Australian PR and the easy road it offered? Quietly let go; it never really felt like the question. What pulled harder was a far-sighted, stubborn purpose and a simple dream — to go back to the roots we came from. The thought that would one day become INUK was already taking shape.
A simple, stubborn thought: build something for the hills we came from — and for the people quietly leaving them behind.
I kept weighing the options and the way forward, with no real clarity on either — just a quiet certainty that something here was worth building. If I'm honest, back then it was hard to believe any of what eventually came was coming at all.
No plan yet — only the question of what could possibly be built for the hills. A regular trip took us back home, and the idea kept quietly turning over in the background.
We scouted Dehradun for a base and looked hard at what was possible — then came home having built nothing. For a while, it stayed just another trip home.
The idea got serious — INUK was born and inuk.in was booked. For the first time, the thoughts in our heads took a shape you could actually see: a diary that filled page after page with everything it could become — features, flows and whole screens, mapped out by hand. We reached for a quick prototype — and couldn’t get it out the door.
Logo ideas came thick and fast until the inuk.in mark was finally locked, and the navy-and-orange identity took hold. We sketched the first mockups, then hired a designer and had the app screens properly designed. A company formed around the brand long before any product shipped. Travel to the hills stayed off the table — covid kept us home. Still, that December we drove out of Bangalore for two camping trips — a BYOT one in Sakleshpur and another near Kanakpura — our first real taste of life under canvas, and the quiet seed of Simra Izar years on.
We finally made the move — driving from Bengaluru up into the mountains and staying almost the whole year, a good, long stretch of it in Kunja, with spells in Haldwani and Haridwar. We incorporated INUK Network Pvt Ltd and opened our first office in Haldwani. We renovated the abandoned family home, and the homestay idea took root right there. We also gave the other two ideas a real go — travel and camping. We took our first real run at building INUK Social — and couldn’t get it built.
Until 2021, our village wasn’t joined to the rest of the world by a proper road — so the people here decided to carve one themselves. That road is the reason we could come home at all: the reason Kunja Homestay was even possible, and the very seed of what we now call INUK Miles. With deep gratitude to the late Puri bu, who set that first path in motion — and gave the rest of us something to build on.
A quick-commerce experiment was doing ~40 orders a day with no app at all. Running the homestay taught us the real roadblocks of operating here. We went deep into photo and film, and one of us qualified as a DGCA-certified drone pilot. We travelled a lot that year: a Feb–March run shooting Kunja Village that seeded our YouTube channel, Meena’s wedding in Haridwar that April, and one last loop through Uttarakhand before the long drive back to Bangalore.
A quieter year on the surface — we kept laying the backend foundations and took another run at INUK Social, which failed again. But we kept coming home to Uttarakhand, filming the hills from the air and learning, in person, the ground we’re building for.
A fresh angle on storytelling emerged, and generative AI moved to the centre of how we build. One of us earned a postgraduate degree in AI/ML from UT Austin, and we re-architected the entire stack — still without shipping a thing — while we kept exploring the state. That April, Airbnb sent Pooja and her team to professionally photograph the homestay, and we spent a good stretch of summer back in Uttarakhand — Aashi’s wedding in Dehradun among it.
MNEGI.COM began to take shape and our travel storytelling grew with AI. A 19-day road trip across Kumaon and Garhwal sharpened the vision, Roma committed to INUK full-time, and we became genuine AI generalists. INUK itself, still unshipped — but closer than ever.
MNEGI.COM shipped its first beta. We’re building INUK Social again — and this time it’s close. We onboarded our first full-time founding engineer, one of us is now learning product management, and INUK Movement — the page you’re reading — finally takes shape.
Six products, one movement — here’s exactly where each one stands right now.
For years we never quite had the focus to bring it home. We’d let the wave slide, then come back to it fully. We experimented, failed, learned and grew — as individuals and as a team. We upskilled, we met and brainstormed with hundreds of people, and we never wanted to give up.
We were never going to settle for running services. The only goal, all along, was to ship a product that shapes the digital identity of Uttarakhand — and every year we failed, then rose again with a new lesson and new fire.
We’re done starting over in private. INUK is being built in the open now. All those years on the road weren’t a detour — they’re the ground a travel platform stands on, and the reason MNEGI.COM is part of this ecosystem. And we’re not going anywhere until the hills have the digital home they deserve.
After all the trying, this is the one we’re seeing through — with you in it. Every movement has a first thousand.
