I'm

Aasim Sani

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I'm the founding engineer at Taxwire, where we automate global sales tax compliance, saving finance teams time and money.

Before this I co-founded Orai (Techstars '18, Forbes 30 Under 30 in Education), an AI public speaking coach that scaled to 1M+ users. I also co-founded CopyCat, a generative-AI Figma → React.js compiler that cut front-end build time by 80% for 20k+ developers. (OnDeck 14, VC-backed.)

Outside work: ex-pro cyclist, certified mountaineer. I read a lot (Goodreads).

Experience

Taxwire

Taxwire

Jan 2024 - present

Founding Engineer (1st employee)

Global sales tax solved. We automate compliance, saving finance teams time and money.

After seven years in AI I wanted to build something with real economic gravity. Boring technology that moves money. Tax compliance is the most-overlooked layer in the modern commerce stack.

I joined as the first engineer and built the plumbing that makes global sales tax actually work inside finance and commerce stacks. Ingestion: connectors for Stripe, QuickBooks, Shopify, and Rillet, including webhooks, historical backfill, and a reconciliation system that catches drift. Compute: the global nexus engine, the US sales tax engine, and a multi-currency exchange layer. Ops: a Temporal-driven backfill orchestrator, an RWX-based CI/CD pipeline, and an internal Slack /deploy bot. Python, DuckDB, PostgreSQL, Temporal.

CopyCat

CopyCat

Jan 2021 - Jan 2024

Co-founder & Chief AI Officer

Convert your Figma designs to React.js code in 30 seconds using AI

At our previous company, the designer-developer handoff broke the front-end pipeline. We started CopyCat to fix it.

We built CopyCat: a generative-AI Figma → React.js compiler that cut web build time by 80%. It reached 20k+ developers.

Orai, Inc.

Orai, Inc.

Nov 2016 - Dec 2020

Intern โ†’ Product Manager โ†’ Co-founder

An AI speech coach for the other 95% who can't afford a human one.

My co-founders and I started Orai because of our experiences as ESL students in the United States. When we came to Drexel, we could speak English fluently, yet we weren't expressive and confident enough, and because of this, we were limited both personally and professionally. We lost friends, internships, and jobs to this problem.

We tried books, online courses, Toastmasters, and finally a speech coach who offered to coach us for free. When we found out a speech coach can charge close to $5,000 for that one-hour session, we built an app that did the same job at a tiny fraction of the cost. Orai scaled to 1M+ users and was adopted by Comcast, IBM, Nike, and HPE. We raised $2.3M from Comcast Ventures, Menlo VC, and BDMI Ventures.

Awards and Involvements

Forbes 30 Under 30: Education (2021)

Forbes 30 Under 30: Education (2021)

Named to the 2021 Forbes 30 Under 30 in Education for Orai.

Techstars x Comcast LIFT Labs (2018)

Techstars x Comcast LIFT Labs (2018)

Techstars Comcast LIFT Labs accelerator. Inaugural cohort, 2018.

ODF14: OnDeck Founders (2022)

ODF14: OnDeck Founders (2022)

OnDeck Founders, class of ODF14 (2022).

Full Stack Deep Learning Best Projects (Spring 2021)

Full Stack Deep Learning Best Projects (Spring 2021)

Top 10 of 271 projects, Full Stack Deep Learning x Berkeley, Spring 2021.

Mass Challenge

Mass Challenge

Mass Challenge accelerator, 2017 cohort. Boston.

Creative Destruction Labs

Creative Destruction Labs

Finalist, Creative Destruction Lab Toronto, 2018 (with Orai).

Hack Princeton (Fall 2018)

Hack Princeton (Fall 2018)

Hack Princeton, Fall 2018. Best Use of Google Cloud Platform.

Education

Georgia Tech

Georgia Tech

I'm pursuing my M.S. in Computer Science at Georgia Tech with a specialization in Computing Systems: partly to formalize my CS background, partly to challenge myself with something genuinely hard.

Drexel University

Drexel University

I studied Entrepreneurship and Computer Science with minors in Marketing and Health Innovations on a 60% scholarship at Drexel. I was part of the Charles D. Close School of Entrepreneurship, the world's only dedicated college of entrepreneurship, ranked #16 globally by the Princeton Review and #2 in the mid-Atlantic region. It was the right kind of intense: Orai got funded out of my dorm room, the research got published, the projects shipped. I also cycled around Philadelphia a lot.

Public Speaking

Keynote at Junior Achievement's

Entrepreneurship Summit

Unlocking Ambition: Lessons learned as a student entrepreneur

Invited Talk

@ Cigna

Explaining artificial intelligence and how it impacts our professional lives

Drexel Rising Starters' Competition Keynote

The mindset that got me from intern to co-founder

Is AI Getting Worse?

Make Sense by Lindsay Tabas is a video podcast that simplifies complex issues at the intersection of tech & people.

Projects

MeowLearning

MeowLearning

Star

This is a pick-your-problem style guide I created to educate everyone, from my leadership team to my ML engineers on working with AI in production settings. This is the stuff you won't learn in most ML/AI courses.

Artificial Manga Panel Dataset

Artificial Manga Panel Dataset

Star

I love manga, but I can't read Japanese, and Google Translate's OCR + translation pipeline isn't great with manga text. So I set out to build a speech-bubble detector to localize manga into English faster (which would also help official translators). There was no free, publicly available dataset to train it on, so I generated one.

gwt: Git Worktree Manager

Star

Stupidly simple git worktree management for ZSH (and PowerShell). Smart branch naming, interactive pruning, and automatic config copying so you can hop between parallel workstreams without losing your shell setup. Built because I kept losing track of half-finished branches and re-cloning repos to escape merge-conflict purgatory.

ML Project Template

ML Project Template

Star

An open-source template repository to kickstart new Machine Learning projects in a standardized way. Originally built for CopyCat's ML team (saving ~2 hours per project), it works for any ML team that wants a repeatable starting point.

Agile Connects

Agile Connects

Energy savings algorithm development

An algorithm to find the upper bound on energy and cost savings when AgileConnects' IoT scheduling decides when AC units cycle on and off.

News and media

Podcasts

Is AI Getting Worse?
Is AI Getting Worse?

For this week's episode of Make Sense, I sit down with Aasim Sani, a 2x AI company founder and Techstars 2018 Alum who has also been featured on Forbes 3

Developers Want Help Building UI's Faster. Aasim Sani Is Here To Help!
Developers Want Help Building UI's Faster. Aasim Sani Is Here To Help!

I had the chance to interview Aasim Sani. As a cofounder of Orai, Aasim and his partners made the Forbes 30 under 30 list. Aasim's newest startup, Copycat, is helping developers build UI faster using AI-powered code-generation. Connect with Aasim on LinkedIn

Orai: Aasim Sani & Paritosh Gupta | Growing Greater - Growing Greater
Orai: Aasim Sani & Paritosh Gupta | Growing Greater - Growing Greater

Season 2 Episode 40: The Art of Public Speaking | Growing Greater This week on Growing Greater we learn of an innovative mobile app that helps people become more effective and confident communicators. Orai, through AI technology, offers interactive, fun lessons that help users understand their use of filler words, pacing, conciseness, and even energy level. We were joined in our studios in Philadelphia by Co-Founder Aasim Sani and had an opportunity to talk to fellow Co-Founder Paritosh Gupta out of Central India. Asam and Paritosh explained to Matt Cabrey, Executive Director of Select Greater Philadelphia, a council of the Chamber of Commerce for Greater Philadelphia how they were able to grow their company out of their Drexel University dorm rooms and gain funding through various pitch competitions.

Forbes Under 30 Summit: Aasim Sani - Business Edge - Podcast en iVoox
Forbes Under 30 Summit: Aasim Sani - Business Edge - Podcast en iVoox

Listen and download Business Edge's episodes for free. ***There is an explicit language warning for this mini-season of Business Edge. The thoughts and opinions of our interviewees do not reflect...

Beyond The Script: Aasim Sani from Orai: A speech coach in your pocket. on Apple Podcasts
Beyond The Script: Aasim Sani from Orai: A speech coach in your pocket. on Apple Podcasts

Show Beyond The Script, Ep Aasim Sani from Orai: A speech coach in your pocket. - Jan 7, 2020

Articles

Orai raises $2.3M to make you a better speaker | TechCrunch
Orai raises $2.3M to make you a better speaker | TechCrunch

Orai, a startup building communication coaching tools, is announcing that it has raised $2.3 million in seed funding. CEO Danish Dhamani said that he co-founded the company with Paritosh Gupta and Aasim Sani to address a need in his own life, the fact that he was "held back personally and professionally" by lackluster "communications [โ€ฆ]

VIDEO | This App Can Help You Prep For That Next Big Presentation | FastCompany
VIDEO | This App Can Help You Prep For That Next Big Presentation | FastCompany

Orai uses artificial intelligence to provide feedback on your speech and help you become a better public speaker.

Aasim Sani: A story of Innovation and Entrepreneurship | UWC Mahindra College | Discover your Purpose
Aasim Sani: A story of Innovation and Entrepreneurship | UWC Mahindra College | Discover your Purpose

Aasim Sani (India, Class of '16) is the co-founder of CopyCat โ€“ a tool to help programmers code faster by converting their designs to code in seconds using AI. CopyCat spun out of a problem he faced at Orai; his previous startup. Orai was an AI-powered speech coaching app he developed as an undergraduate at Drexel [โ€ฆ]

Orai | Technically Media
Orai | Technically Media

Formerly known as SayUmm and Oratio, Orai offers an enterprise software platform for sales training in the life sciences industry. The system uses machine learning algorithms to automatically evaluate a sales pitch on parameters such as content, confidence, clarity, tone and energy.

An App to Make You a Better Public Speaker | Smithsonian Magazine
An App to Make You a Better Public Speaker | Smithsonian Magazine

Orai, created by two college students, uses AI to help people become more fluent, confident speakers through consistent practice and feedback.

Get over your public speaking fears with this confidence-boosting AI app | Cult of Mac
Get over your public speaking fears with this confidence-boosting AI app | Cult of Mac

If you break out in a cold sweat every time you switch into presenter mode on Zoom, you're not alone. About 75% of the population struggles with the fear of public speaking.

# The 7 Best Apps to Beat Your Fear of Public Speaking | Make Use Of
# The 7 Best Apps to Beat Your Fear of Public Speaking | Make Use Of

It's not easy standing up in front of a crowd and making a speech. No matter how many times you rehearse it, your nerves can still tie your tongue. The best way to prevent this from happening is practice and coming to see public speaking as a fun challenge.

Gain confidence and learn how to give presentations like a pro with this AI powered app | PC World
Gain confidence and learn how to give presentations like a pro with this AI powered app | PC World

The Orai Personal AI Speech Coach is an AI-powered app that can make anyone a better public speaker.

Terrified of public speaking? Orai uses machine learning to turn your phone into a speaking coach
Terrified of public speaking? Orai uses machine learning to turn your phone into a speaking coach

Speaking in public shouldn't fill you with fear. Orai puts a free public speaking coach on your phone

Want to improve your public speaking skills? There's an app for that
Want to improve your public speaking skills? There's an app for that

Drexel University students Danish Dhamani and Paritosh Gupta reveal the inspiration behind Orai, an app that helps users improve their public speaking abilities

Want to captivate an audience like Obama? There's an app for that
Want to captivate an audience like Obama? There's an app for that

Orai is powered by artificial intelligence, which gives immediate, personalised feedback on users' public speaking prowess

Orai: The cure for public speaking phobias
Orai: The cure for public speaking phobias

This is one in a series of stories that highlights each company in the 2018 class of the Comcast NBCUniversal LIFT Labs Accelerator, powered by Techstars.

Orai app uses AI to help you become a better public speaker
Orai app uses AI to help you become a better public speaker

When Danish Dhamani arrived in the U.S. from Tanzania four years ago, he found that he wasn't a good public speaker. So he set about trying to fix that by going to Toastmasters meetings. There, [โ€ฆ]

Research

Founderitis: a silent killer of startups

Founderitis: a silent killer of startups

A case study from my own experience with Orai: how power imbalances inside a founding team cascade into catastrophic failure.

Activating Entrepreneurship

Activating Entrepreneurship

With Drs. Zahed Subhan, Liza Herzog, and David Hayes. A moderation/mediation analysis of how psychometric traits like resilience shape college students' decision to launch a startup.

Full title: "Activating Entrepreneurship: revisiting the theories of planned behavior & the entrepreneurial event through an analysis of the moderating & mediating effects of entrepreneurial dimensions on self-efficacy & initial intentions to launch."