Tarun Upaday.

Tarun Upaday

Building companies where software meets messy real-world operations.

Co-founder of Pine Labs, GlobalLogic, hCentive, Routespring and Uprobotics. I write about company-building, operational AI, technology and the decisions that survive contact with customers.

Read the field notes → What I'm building →
Tarun Upaday

Mid-project. As always.

Pine Labs — payments GlobalLogic — product engineering hCentive — healthcare infrastructure Routespring — airline operations

What I'm Building Now

Routespring

Technology for corporate travel and airline crew operations.

Automating airline crew travel, disruption handling and the operational work traditional software leaves to humans.

More about Routespring →

Uprobotics

A hands-on robotics and technology learning program for children.

Teaching children to build robots, work through ambiguity and discover that debugging is mostly an emotional-regulation exercise.

Explore Uprobotics →

Experiments

Smaller projects and prototypes.

Software, AI agents, home infrastructure, 3D printing and other projects that started with "this should be simple."

See the projects →

Featured Thinking

Four pieces that hold up: on pivoting cleanly, building around customer concentration, measuring automation honestly, and what routing optimization actually optimizes for.

  • Pivot gates

    How founders can distinguish a slow strategy from a broken premise before sunk cost makes the decision for them.

    Jul 21, 2026 · Building Routespring

  • Building when one customer dominates the business

    Concentration isn't the real risk — failing to convert a dominant customer into reusable product is. The metric that matters isn't percentage of revenue. It's percentage of the business that could transfer to another customer.

    Jul 21, 2026 · Operating Notes

  • Manual minutes per transaction is better than "AI adoption"

    "AI adoption" is one of the least useful metrics in software. Manual minutes per transaction is hard to fake, captures hidden labor, and separates adopting AI from actually improving operations.

    Jul 21, 2026 · Operating Notes

  • Routing optimization isn't a shortest-path problem

    The hard part of flight routing was never finding the cheapest itinerary. It's that 'cheapest' and 'best' are different questions, and one of them is a hard rule while the other is a matter of taste.

    Jul 21, 2026 · Thinking in Public

Read all the writing →

From the archive

Earlier writing about startups, engineering, hiring and product development.

Earlier Chapters

1998

Pine Labs

Started with card-based payment systems for Indian retail. Pine Labs completed its IPO on the BSE and NSE in November 2025.

2000

GlobalLogic

Built the initial engineering organization and helped scale it into a global product-development company, later sold to Hitachi for $9.6B.

2009

hCentive

Built healthcare enrollment infrastructure during the creation of the ACA marketplaces. Acquired by Optum in 2019.

2020

Routespring

Building software and AI for operationally difficult travel workflows — now focused on airline crew operations.

The longer version →

Press & Milestones

Off Duty

When I'm not running a company, I coach robotics, build unnecessary home infrastructure and design 3D-printed solutions to problems most people correctly choose to ignore.

See off-duty →