I came across this story almost by accident, the kind of thing you stumble on while scrolling and then can’t stop thinking about. It’s about a guy named Siddhartha Saxena. An IIT Kanpur graduate. A small-town kid who ended up building AI companies in America. And somewhere along the way, he had a single day where he made close to $8 million. That’s about ₹76.99 crore. In one day.
Let that sit for a second. Not a year. Not a quarter. One day.
He Didn’t Start With Any Shortcuts
What I liked most about digging into his story is that there’s no shortcut hiding anywhere in it. He didn’t come from money. He grew up in a small town in India, the kind of place where getting into an IIT feels more like a rumor than a real possibility for most kids.
But he got in anyway. IIT Kanpur, Computer Science. He’s said in interviews that cracking that particular program is something like twenty times harder than getting into Harvard. That might be his own exaggeration, but it’s not far off from the truth. IIT Kanpur sits near the very top of India’s engineering colleges, and the Computer Science seats go to a tiny sliver of students out of the lakhs who take the JEE exam every year.
He finished his degree in 2019.
The Quiet Years Nobody Talks About
Here’s the part people usually skip over when they tell success stories. Before Merlin, before the millions, Siddhartha Saxena spent years just… working. Learning. Bouncing around.
He interned at Envestnet. Did a research stint at Aalto University in Finland. Worked at Yodlee in Bengaluru, then at Wadhwani AI in Mumbai. After graduating, he moved to Canada to work as a machine learning engineer at Jumio.
None of that sounds exciting on paper. No headlines there. But if you look closely, it’s a pretty deliberate path, research in one country, applied AI in another, hands-on engineering somewhere else entirely. He was quietly stacking skills before he ever tried building something of his own.
Then Came Merlin
In 2022, Saxena and two of his IIT Kanpur batchmates, Pratyush Rai and Sirsendu Sarkar, started Merlin. It’s a Chrome extension powered by AI, built to help people work faster using generative AI tools right inside their browser.
The timing was almost perfect. This was right as tools like ChatGPT were exploding, and people were suddenly hungry for ways to fold AI into their everyday work without juggling ten different tabs. Merlin filled that gap. It grew fast. Today it’s reportedly valued at around $50 million.
He also co-founded a second venture, Thine, which is a whole other chapter of his story still being written.
So, About That One Day
This is the part that got everyone talking. In an interview with content creator Viraj Ala, done in that quick, street-style rapid-fire format, someone asked Siddhartha Saxena the usual question. What’s the most you’ve ever earned in a year?
He didn’t really answer that. Instead he said, I can tell you something better. I made $8 million in a single day.
The interviewer paused and asked, so you became a millionaire in one day? Saxena just smiled. Yeah, he said. Something like that.
He was 26.
Nobody’s laid out the full details of what exactly happened that day, whether it was tied to Merlin’s growth, an investment, or something else entirely. But you don’t really need the fine print to understand the bigger picture. A kid from a small town spent years learning his craft, took a risk on an idea, and one day, it paid off in a way most people never get to experience.
The Mindset He Talks About
The number is what grabs attention, but honestly, the more interesting thing he said in that interview was about mindset.
Saxena talked about something he calls a scarcity mindset, which he thinks a lot of people in India grow up with simply because resources were tight growing up. It’s not a criticism, just an observation. But he believes that mindset can quietly hold people back later in life, even after circumstances change.
His answer to that is what he calls an abundance mindset. Basically, believing there’s more out there than what’s right in front of you, and being willing to take a risk to go find it.
It’s a simple idea. Not a new one either. But hearing it from someone who’s actually lived it hits differently than hearing it from a motivational poster.
Why This Story Sticks With Me
I think it’s easy to read a headline like “made 76 crore in one day” and roll your eyes a little. It sounds unreal. But when you actually trace the path, small town, tough exam, years of quiet internships across three or four countries, a startup built with old college friends, it stops feeling like luck and starts feeling like something closer to patience meeting opportunity.
Entrepreneur Siddhartha Saxena is still young. Merlin is still growing. Thine is still early. There’s probably more to this story that hasn’t happened yet.
But for right now, it’s a good one. The kind of story that makes you wonder what you’d do if you let go of a little scarcity thinking yourself.
