A pre-MBA recruiting pitch, in verse

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Shantanu Gangal

CEO at Prodigal

September 20, 2025

I started this post,

For the b-school apps. round one,

A pre-MBA gig here sounded fun!!

meanwhile H-1B is toast,

Build with us now right where you are

but have real AI impact deep & far! 💸

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More notes from the team

Shantanu Gangal

CEO at Prodigal

AI is front, center and loudly making the waves Money20/20 . key themes that came up to dozens of conversations 1. Choice of AI models. implications on cost, delivery & understanding 2. impact & ROI as AI budget 'renewals' begin 3.

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October 20, 2026

Vaibhav Gupta

Solutions, GTM & Delivery at Prodigal

Bringing AI-agents with deep consumer finance expertise 🚀 Come experience our AI-agents in action at Money 20/20 Vegas - Booth #22086 Prodigal

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October 18, 2026

Mayank Agarwal

Head of Voice Agent Platform at Prodigal

Tesla made a car jump, flip mid air and land. That shouldn't be possible, and yet the internet just watched it happen. Here's the Consumer Finance version: A borrower calls, disputing a balance and hangs up having paid it.

Came home Friday evening to my 7y boy building a game on Gemini canvas. The first user and main gameplay centered around the younger 5y old!! A flurry of typed prompts and thrilling runs. Lots of giggles. Score 1 for build 🎯 ...

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October 12, 2026

Anshul Mittal

Head of Engineering at Prodigal

Engineers love romanticizing the idea of disappearing into a cave and cutting themselves off from the world to build something great.

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October 8, 2026

Mayank Agarwal

Head of Voice Agent Platform at Prodigal

I was trying to understand why we handle the TCN dialer integration and its webhook retries the way we do. The code, comments, runbook, and design doc all explained what we do. None of them explained why it is shaped that way.

Production grade AI agents are a realm apart. doubly so in high stakes consumer finance. come see what we have learnt at Prodigal ft Sumanyu, Saurabh Shintre & your truly

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September 2, 2026

Mayank Agarwal

Head of Voice Agent Platform at Prodigal

There will be two kinds of engineers in 2030: those who watch AI reshape their profession, and those who use it to reshape entire industries. The video is about the first kind. I refuse to be one.

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August 19, 2026

Sangram Raje

Co-Founder & CTO at Prodigal

A few days together in Coorg with the team. We have grown a lot, but the best parts still feel familiar. People reason from first principles, share ideas openly and care about getting the details right.

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August 4, 2026

Anshul Mittal

Head of Engineering at Prodigal

A few days together in Coorg with all 78 of us! It was a good reminder that behind every system, launch and engineering milestone is a team of people asking hard questions, helping one another and caring deeply about the work.

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July 29, 2026

Sumanyu Ghoshal

Voice Agents for Consumer Finance at Prodigal

Working with Vaibhav Gupta is a masterclass on deploying AI Agents. 1. Military precision on deadlines while not hampering the quality or effectiveness of the agent, supported by clear communication with customers 2.

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July 8, 2026

What offshore operations teach about deploying AI agents

Vaibhav Gupta

Solutions, GTM & Delivery at Prodigal

As SLB marks 100 years, I found myself reflecting on the lessons that shaped my approach to how I operate. After spending 8+ years in offshore (into-the-sea) operations, I realized many of those principles are becoming increasingly relevant as more workflows shift to AI.…

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July 3, 2026

Anshul Mittal

Head of Engineering at Prodigal

I attended LangChain Interrupt last month in SF, and here are my top takeaways: 1. With LLM-assisted development lowering the bar to ship tooling and apps, defensibility for SaaS companies is a question worth thinking about.

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Aryton Senna said, "You cannot overtake 15 cars in sunny weather, but you can when it is raining.". Sean & the team at Williams, Rush & Associates LLC exemplify this embracing AI agents to transform all aspects of their business & jumping…

I'm mostly a tables & numbers guy ... ... but occasionally an image leaves an impression that 7 figure cells don't 🗺️ - AI has created tangible bottom line impact for lenders & agencies - we're hitting new highs multiple days in a row ...

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May 1, 2026

Sumanyu Ghoshal

Voice Agents for Consumer Finance at Prodigal

It is truly painstaking to build a Forward Deployed Org - being customer oriented while making sure that the product succeeds on its own and that we're not just building custom software leads to friction, stress and a whole new definition…

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April 6, 2026

A product marketing skills library, built on Claude

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Product Marketing at Prodigal

After 6 years in B2B SaaS marketing, I mapped workflows I run as a product marketer, then built an AI system to automate it. Product marketers spend 60-70% of their time on process-heavy work: launch planning, positioning docs, battlecards, sales enablement, messaging…

Kristyn, Daniel & I are excited to going up next on stage at Receivables Management Association International ⏰

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February 11, 2026

Sangram Raje

Co-Founder & CTO at Prodigal

Had a great time at #ARMTech 2026! One thing I like about these events is that they're a good way to step out of build mode for a bit. Just talking to people who are using AI in their day-to-day operations and the impact they're seeing.

Great catching up over dinner with people we’ve been working closely with across the industry. Really enjoyed the time together with good conversations, laughs, and a nice way to extend the #ARMTech conversations into the evening. Thanks for making time.

Yuval Noah Harari is the ultimate storyteller in Sapiens. Not only does he visualize the story of our species well; but also shares how stories are the glue of civilization & progress. As our AI branches out and scales rapidly, we need to re-live the vision, chutzpah, and…

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January 25, 2026

Sangram Raje

Co-Founder & CTO at Prodigal

Thanks SeedToScale and Accel in India for the opportunity; it was great to reflect on how far Prodigal has come. I enjoyed sitting down and talking about our core belief that consumers deserved better treatment from financial institutions.

It was exactly on 1st December that Ganesh, Parasvil and I got placed on Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay into Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Vividly remember like it was yesterday. So while many specifics have changed, the optimism + energy of hiring at Placement Office…

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December 2, 2025

Sumanyu Ghoshal

Voice Agents for Consumer Finance at Prodigal

Excited to share that Prodigal is at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay to hire a select group of exceptional AI And ML engineers!

Running a high growth AI startup means ⚖️ balancing sales today with research for tomorrow 🏋 deferring current comfort for probabilistic risks and 🪄 trading tangible cash for intangible IP. Even then when I picked up Morgan Housel's latest, "The Art of Spending Money", little…

Some AI can be built from anywhere. Some can’t. That’s the difference between horizontal and vertical AI. Horizontal products solve broad problems, so geography matters less. But vertical AI has to sit close to the people who know the industry inside out. And when you zoom out…

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September 24, 2025

Why 2026 could be the year to build in India

Sangram Raje

Co-Founder & CTO at Prodigal

For a long time, the path was to get into a U.S. university, graduate, secure H1B, work for a few years and maybe start a company. If that was your plan, it’s okay to feel uncertain right now. You prepared, you worked, you dreamed. You did nothing wrong. But here’s a thought…

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September 23, 2025

Sangram Raje

Co-Founder & CTO at Prodigal

The difficult part of building AI agents is testing them. A consumer may be in early delinquency and just need a quick reminder. Another may be weeks past due and demanding a settlement. Someone might be cooperative, another emotional, another hostile. Even something as simple…

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September 2, 2025

Why AI in fintech still needs a human in the loop

Anshul Mittal

Head of Engineering at Prodigal

Got a little cameo in Forbes India this week They were covering GPT-5 and its big leap in reducing “hallucinations” by 45–80% (compared to GPT-4o), which is huge for anyone working in AI. In the piece, I talked about why even with these improvements, you still need a human in…

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August 14, 2025

One year at Prodigal: from new joiner to team lead

Anshul Mittal

Head of Engineering at Prodigal

A year ago, I stepped into an entirely new world. After spending years in B2C startups, shifting to B2B SaaS - especially in the lending and collections space - felt overwhelming. A new industry, new challenges, and a team I barely knew. And just a few weeks in, I found myself…

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March 12, 2025

Thinking about moving back to India? Questions worth asking

Sangram Raje

Co-Founder & CTO at Prodigal

Moving back to India from the US was an important decision that I took in my career. I spoke about the decision in a recent post and many engineers from the US, Europe, Singapore reached out about shifting back to India. We discussed various points around career, finances…

🥳 Landed in Mumbai at 3 AM & straight to our annual Prodigal offsite! After a year of working hard, took the weekend to party harder 🥧 Why am I so excited? Because we're seeing change right in front of us. Change in technology, Change in the Lending vertical and most…

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March 9, 2025

Teaching an AI agent to understand nuance

Anshul Mittal

Head of Engineering at Prodigal

How do you teach AI to understand nuance? That’s the kind of engineering challenge we love at Prodigal. At last weekend’s #GenAI #Hackathon, we built an AI agent that automates QA processes—a complex engineering task. The goal? Create a system that listens to calls, fills out…

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January 14, 2025

Lessons from a fireside chat with Perplexity's CEO

Sangram Raje

Co-Founder & CTO at Prodigal

"The highest dopamine rush wasn't from raising millions." Aravind, Perplexity's CEO, smiled as he shared this at our fireside chat. "It was reading the first 3,000 queries users made to our engine." That hit home. Because real impact matters more than headlines. Here's what else…

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December 30, 2024

Retention Radar: decoding Manyavar's customer engagement

Karan Ashta

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🚨 As part of Retention Radar, here's the summary of the Executive Report I have created for Vedant Fashions Limited - Manyavar-Mohey 🤙 For those who don't know, the goal behind Retention Radar is simple: to track customer engagement strategies of large consumer businesses and…

✨ Growing up in Mumbai, the most exciting part of #Diwali was building clay forts (किल्ले). On one hand it harked back to self reliance, independence and chutzpah that Ch. Shivaji showed in "starting up" the Maratha empire against large slow moving incumbents. But in the moment…

Auto Finance News Summit'24 was a flurry of deep dialogue. it's no secret that sub prime auto lending has been hard over last 12-18 months but as this view reminded me in the cab out, there is a silver lining to every cloud and a sunrise to follow shortly after every sunset. be…

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October 9, 2024

Notes from Prodigal's first AI event in Bengaluru

Sumanyu Ghoshal

Voice Agents for Consumer Finance at Prodigal

We at Prodigal hosted our first AI event in Bengaluru this Saturday. From product demos showing how AI is used in the real-world by Leading entertainment businesses to how cutting edge Gen AI is being used for State of the Art performance, it was a wonderful event to listen…

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October 7, 2024

Generate and Organize: structured output from LLMs

Sangram Raje

Co-Founder & CTO at Prodigal

Ever hit a wall trying to get LLMs to generate structured text? We’ve all been there. In our case we faced challenges in Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE); getting these models to output structured information effectively has always been a tough nut to…

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August 26, 2024

The best leaders are great individual contributors

Sangram Raje

Co-Founder & CTO at Prodigal

“The best leaders are great individual contributors.” It's challenging to step out of your comfort zone and learn the skills needed to be a great leader. But if you're already a great individual contributor, you're closer than you think because you're disciplined, have strong…

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July 12, 2024

Anshul Mittal

Head of Engineering at Prodigal

🚀 Exciting Opportunity Alert! 🚀 Join the revolutionary journey at Prodigal, a fast-growing Bay Area-based startup transforming the finance and lending industries with AI and ML-powered solutions! Backed by esteemed investors like Menlo Ventures, Accel, and Y-Combinator, we're on…

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March 26, 2024

Sumanyu Ghoshal

Voice Agents for Consumer Finance at Prodigal

Recently, there has been a buzz about cross-border SaaS. We have seen some extremely successful companies: From Zoho which started the trend of having Engineering in India with Go-to-Market (GTM) in the US to Venture-backed startups such as Freshworks, Mindtickle, Chargebee, and…

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October 5, 2023

From intern to Harvard Business School, by way of Prodigal

Sumanyu Ghoshal

Voice Agents for Consumer Finance at Prodigal

I cannot thank Shantanu Gangal, Sangram Raje and Vijayan Seshasayee enough for the opportunities that they have provided me, starting as an intern in 2020. Thanks Ninad Deshpande, Sourav Rajak and Bradley Young for considering me to share more about Prodigal. Prodigal shared…

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August 9, 2022

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