Pratik Sharda, CEO CraftifAI: Building Physical AI | Mind & Money

Episode 17. The mind behind the decision. In the seventeenth episode of Mind & Money, I sit down with Pratik Sharda, Co-Founder and CEO of CraftifAI. Pratik is an electronics engineer who led the hardware products at PhonePe, India's biggest fintech company, and built the payment devices business into a 200 million dollar category in three years. Today CraftifAI builds AI agents that write the software running inside robots, drones and smart devices. The company raised a 3 million dollar seed round this year and was picked for the Google for Startups Accelerator. We get into what he learned putting payment speakers into shops all over India: the hardware was never the hard part, the software inside the device was. Pratik explains, with a robot dog as the example, why AI is moving from the cloud onto the device itself, and what that means for speed and cost. Then the part this podcast is about. He works with the idea that you only have a few quality decisions per day, so he spends his energy on the hardest problem first and tells his team openly when something has to wait five days. He shares why AI has made a leader's day more demanding, because every task comes back for a decision faster than before. We also talk about the couple of hours a week he keeps for himself, why investor rejections turned out to be some of the best feedback he got, and what he would tell his 18 year old self: start building early, fail, learn faster. Pratik is hiring engineers and looking for teams that build robots, drones or IoT devices and want to try the platform. LinkedIn is the fastest way to reach him.