Mid-project. As always.
About
Founder. Builder.
If I have one skill, it is this: I show up early, I build the product and tech foundation, and I stay long enough to see if the thing has legs.
I'm Tarun Upadhyay — founder and CEO of Routespring. I grew up in New Delhi, studied at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, and have spent close to thirty years building software companies across India and the United States. The through-line across all of them is the same: software for operationally complex industries — payments, healthcare, and now travel — where the exceptions are the job.
What I'm building
Routespring is a B2B corporate travel platform I co-founded in 2020, and it is my main current operating role. We build software for corporate travel and airline crew operations — booking, payments, hotel operations, disruption handling and reconciliation. Over the last year we turned sharply toward airline crew travel: the layer between scheduling systems and a tired pilot finding a hotel room at 2 AM during an irregular operation. It never fit traditional software — too much unstructured text, too much fragmented coordination, too many exceptions.
That is exactly the shape of work AI is now good at. The current focus is using it to automate the exception-heavy operational work traditional systems leave behind — voice agents that call hotels, rebooking engines that resolve disruptions in minutes, software that does the services work itself.
Up Robotics
Alongside Routespring, I am a co-founder and advisor to Up Robotics, a hands-on robotics and engineering program for young students. My role is not day-to-day operating management; I help with strategy, technology and the occasional problem that appears to require more adults than children.
The companies before this one
hCentive. Co-founder and CTO from 2009 to 2020. I built healthcare eligibility, enrollment and exchange technology while the ACA marketplaces were still being created. hCentive was acquired by Optum in 2019.
GlobalLogic (originally Induslogic). Co-founder and Head of Engineering from 2000 to 2009. I built the early engineering organization as GlobalLogic became a global product-development company. It was sold to Apax Partners in 2013 and acquired by Hitachi in 2021 — both well after my tenure, but they say something about what the early team built.
Pine Labs. Co-founder and CTO from 1998 to 2000. I helped start the company in Delhi, building card-based payment technology for Indian retailers. Pine Labs is now one of India's largest fintech companies and completed its IPO in 2025 — twenty-five years after I moved on.
In between, I was CEO of Gallop.ai, a travel technology company that merged with the Japanese travel major Amnet in 2019 — the chapter that led into my current travel work.
The dates matter: I was there at the start of each company, and the largest outcomes came years or decades after I had moved to the next one. The full history, with independent sources, is on its own page.
Selected references
Independent coverage of the companies and outcomes above:
- Forbes — What Does Hitachi's $9.6B Acquisition of GlobalLogic Tell Us?
- PR Newswire — Hitachi to Acquire GlobalLogic
- Wikipedia — Pine Labs
- Wikipedia — hCentive
Elsewhere
Side projects
I'm a tinkerer by temperament. My home doubles as a small lab: a dozen UniFi access points I probably didn't need, and 3D-printed outlet plates I designed myself because the off-the-shelf ones are offensively generic.
I also spend time with youth robotics teams through Up Robotics. It may be the best management training I have found: patience, systems thinking, and knowing when to let the kids debug their own code.
Separate ranked lists of movies and TV I recommend live on their own pages.
Get in touch
If you're working on something interesting in aviation, corporate travel, or AI in operations — or you just want to argue about why anyone needs a dozen UniFi access points (they do) — the contact page is the best way to reach me. You can also subscribe to The Manifest for new writing.