Akshpreet
CEO and Co-founder
Sets the long arc. Spends his weeks talking to students so the product never drifts from the people it is built for.
Who we are
Collab47 is India's academia to industry collaboration network. We are bootstrap-funded and building the kind of product we wished existed when we were starting out, for students, researchers, faculty, institutions, and industry.
Founded 2026.
India.
Bootstrapped, by design.
From the manifesto
Every existing professional network was designed for someone else. A 40-year-old in San Francisco. A consultant in London. A graduate of three institutions in a country that built its middle class fifty years before ours. India does not need a translation of that product. It needs its own.
Collab47 begins with a single belief. Eighty million Indian students are graduating into the largest talent market in the world, and the tools they use to find work, find each other, and find their first project still treat them like rows in a placement-cell spreadsheet.
We are building the opposite. A network where a second-year from a tier-3 college can publish a working prototype on Tuesday and have a conversation with a founder in Bengaluru by Friday. Where the unit of identity is not the institution, it is the work.
The founders
The six people on the hook for this.
No outside capital. No advisory board larger than the operating team. Equity is held by the people doing the work, in proportion to the work being done.
SSMallick
MD and Chief Growth Officer
Runs the ground game. From campus chapters to founding-class outreach, every early user comes through a system he wrote on paper first.
Shaurya Punj
CTO and Founding Engineer
Owns the stack end to end. Believes a network for builders should itself be built quietly, in public, with proof you can read in the commit log.
Rachit
CMO, Academic
Translates between professors, placement cells and 19-year-olds. Knows where the syllabus ends and where real work has to begin.
Partha
CMO, Industry and CAO
The bridge into companies actually hiring. Brings the recruiter side of the table to a network that has had only one side for too long.
Agnivo
Tech Advisor
The senior eye on architecture. Helps a young engineering team make decisions they will still be proud of in three years.
Founding principles
Four rules we will not break.
01
Merit over pedigree
What you have shipped matters more than where you studied. The profile shows the work, and the work argues for itself.
02
Built in India, for India
Vernacular, internet-poor, tier-2 and tier-3 first. If it does not work in Patna on a 4G connection, it does not ship.
03
Work first, resume never
The feed is shipped code, drafts, designs and field notes. A list of titles you once held is not a substitute for proof.
04
Calm over noisy
No streaks, no badges, no rage-bait. The network rewards the slow, considered post over the loud one. Always.