Bengaluru,
India | 5th May 2026 : Funding
led by Campus Fund with participation from Avalanche and leading angel
investors to back a more personal future for AI. Banza today announced it has
raised $1 million USD in a pre-seed funding round led by Campus Fund, with
participation from Avalanche and a group of leading angel investors.
Banza is
building toward a future where every person can build and own a personal AI
Twin that becomes more useful, more personal, and more human over time. While
much of today’s AI still feels broad and interchangeable, Banza is built on a
different belief: the next important chapter of AI will be shaped by personal
relevance.
Across
digital platforms, recommendations are often influenced by platform incentives,
siloed systems, and fragmented context. Food delivery apps prioritize
visibility within their own marketplace. Streaming platforms can only recommend
from within their own libraries. Generic AI tools respond intelligently, but
often without truly understanding the person behind the prompt. The result is
an internet full of suggestions that are useful to platforms, but not always
aligned with the individual.
Banza is
building a different model. Its AI Twin is designed to learn from a user’s
preferences, habits, and context over time, helping them make better decisions
across everyday life, and often acting ahead of them. From what to eat and
watch to where to go, what to buy, and how to plan experiences, the goal is to
create AI that works in the user’s favor, not the platform’s.
“Most
recommendations today are shaped by what works for the platform, not what truly
works for the person,” said Aditya Vijaykumar, CTO at Banza. “Each service sees
only a fragment of who you are, which makes the experience biased, siloed, and
incomplete. We believe people should be able to build and own an AI Twin that
understands them more deeply over time and works in their favor across everyday
decisions.”
The funding
will be used to accelerate product development, deepen the user experience,
grow the team, and strengthen the foundation for this new category of personal
AI. Banza also sees this as an important step toward a future where AI becomes
a layer individuals can shape around their own lives, rather than a system they
must constantly adapt to.
With over
200,000 users already on the platform, Banza is entering this next chapter at a
time when AI is becoming part of everyday life, yet still often feels impersonal.
The company’s long-term vision is to build a personal intelligence layer for
everyday life that helps people turn fragmented digital behaviour into
something that works in their favor.
About Banza
Banza is building a future where every person can build and own a
personal AI Twin that becomes more useful over time. By helping users turn
fragmented digital behaviour into AI that works in their favor, Banza is
shaping a more personal and human layer for everyday life.
The company is remote-first, with the team spread across states and united by a
shared belief that AI should work for people, not platforms.
Banza was founded by Mehdi Abdi (CEO), Suraj Mulla (CBO), and Aditya Vijaykumar
(CTO), three builders who came together to reimagine how people relate to the
technology they use every day.
