I'm the CEO and co-founder of Midfleet. Hi, my name is Raju. I am the CTO and also
the co-founder of Midfleet. So we met, what, 20 years ago? More than 20 years ago
in high school. Yeah, we met actually in Sweden, in Uppsala. Yeah. We did college
together or high school. College, high school, I don't know what you call it.
Second up and dirty high school? Second up and dirty. We studied computer science.
Without the computer? Without the computer or the science. We both worked in the tech
field for a very long time. Me, I worked for Google plus my own startups, building
digital healthcare products, but also advised hundreds of startups across Europe
as well as Asia Pacific. And done some interesting, cool projects with companies
like Tencent, Alibaba, H&M, and all sorts. But, you know, in 2016, I was at the
launch event of TensorFlow, which is Google's own machine learning algorithm.
And this is kind of where I saw the first promises of what artificial intelligence
can actually do. And this was in 2016, if I remember correctly, end of 2016. And I
saw the live Go match between a computer and the best Go player. Go is that Chinese
game. It's one of those complex board games. And I could see that the machine
was learning the first few games and it'll start winning and just dominating that
best Go player in the world. And then, you know, from there, I could see, you know,
the reasoning capabilities were there, the question is, when is it able to do actual
work? You saw the beginnings of what we are doing today. Yes. And the writing was on
the wall already. But what I knew also is that I wanted to start my own company in
tech. And my purpose was that I wanted to help others with technology. So I built a
bunch of digital health companies, exited one in 2022. And then I quickly realized
while I was working for the company that acquired us that, no, no, I want to go
back and build something else. And we went back to each other. We started traveling
together. Backpacking through Southeast Asia. Before we even started with Midfleet and
all of that, right? So we, we initially we met in high school. Yeah. And then you did
some, what do you call this? Lumpen, right? Yeah. I did my military service.
Military services. And I went on to a spiritual journey. So at, I think, 18, 19,
we just took different routes. Yeah. And I've always, you know, seen Ahmed and what
he has been doing and on LinkedIn. And he, you were traveling around the world with a
motorbike and you did some crazy stuff there. Right? Yeah. Just being a young
guy. Trying to understand the world. Trying to understand the world. Trying to
see where we fit in. And try to see like, okay, how can we build stuff, you know,
improve humanity. As a young guy, like gets very, very visionary about things. It
was a, it was a philosophical journey and a journey to just see who you are as well,
I guess. And I had a similar journey as well, but it was another take of the same.
And it's, it's an interesting journey for both of us. I left when I was 19 and I had
my so-called monk life. It was a monk in India. Yeah. I was a monk in India living
outside of a bag and just moving around different mosques and temples and stuff
like that. I was doing that for a long time. Yeah. For a long, long time. Before
I decided that, hey, I mean, you know, you need money, man. You should do something.
You can't just walk around like a monk all your life. You become a dad very early. I
became a dad. I married very early. And then I was like, hey, I'm in this
situation. I need money. Yeah. And I realized that, okay, I need to do
something. And I was pretty early with the tech and engineering. I was building my
own computers. I don't remember when, like 10 years or something. So it was, it was,
it was a natural way to go and solve problems. So, and then I started in tech
and I was in it for, for a long, long, long time. Working mostly with
infrastructure, cloud, dev ops, dev sec ops, site reliability, you name it. I've
done the most of the things in this area. And also being in Australia, being in
Atlassian, it gave me a lot of knowledge and experience as well. But then 2022,
when we met up again, it was actually when I was in Australia, you were like, hey
man, what you doing? And I was like, I'm in Australia. Yeah. And then he was like,
okay, but let's come and meet up. So I went to Thailand, met you and we had a
trip and journey where we were just philosophizing and talking about anything.
Anything. Right. Yeah. But then I also like realized the sort of strength of
working together. We're not just sitting and agreeing with each other. We actually
complement each other very, very well. Challenging each other as well. And, you
know, a healthy disposition of just growing an idea to sort of taking a kernel
that one person has and then just, you know, running with it. And I think kind of
this is how Midfleet came to be. It was taking that kernel and just making
something out of it together. Because, you know, if you would be alone, if I would be
alone, we wouldn't be getting to that.
No, absolutely not. Like, what was going on? Yeah. But also believing in that
color, as we say, we are like my strong belief in Islam and God and the destiny
that we meet again. And we have a journey in front of us where we don't know
actually where we're going, but we know we have a trust where we are building
together. We are sacrificing time, money, and effort. And we are really like when we
started, it was a question mark. It was a big question mark. But like with all good
ideas, it has to be a little bit of a resistance to it almost, you know. But
we're not pessimists by nature, but we have to inject that little bit of
pessimism to question validity of something. Yeah, but we knew we had to
build something. Yeah. So I remember when I, after the journey in Penang in
November, 2025, and I was almost like 2024, I left corporate BS. And I was like,
you know, I was still in the monk mode in a way, like again, like what should I do?
And then after that journey, came back to Sweden and just, I was like, Ahmed, you
have to look at this, man. Yeah. You know, just look at this. And he was like, what's
up, what's up? And he was looking at it. And then, you know, we came together. It
was like, this is it. This is it. This is it. It was an agent talking to another
agent. And for me at that time, I was like also in the same position as everybody
else in tech at that point where we were kind of running around with our heads
unscrewed like chickens without heads. And just asking us like, what can you actually
do with this? What's possible? What does the technology allow to do? Is it over
promising? And this is the question that where Midfleet was born from, right? Yeah.
We can do a lot of stuff with agents. He can ask it anything. And essentially, he
can tell it to go in and build a product. You can tell it to sell that product or he
can tell it to call your mom and say you're late. Whatever. You know, all of
these things kind of like, okay. So we saw the headlines getting up there. Everybody
was talking about AI. Okay. What are they talking about? It's like, oh, the AI is
taking over. It's singularity, AGI. And we were sitting with agents and we saw the
reality was actually quite different when they started asking it. Even simple stuff
started drifting, doing something else. And it became increasingly very apparent
we wanted to do when agents talk to each other. We didn't want it to control that
path as infrastructure, as a runtime. We saw that problem of them drifting and
doing something else or guaranteeing an outcome or working towards a goal
together. It's something that you need to control. Right. And we don't see that as
workflows. We don't see that necessarily as that. We see it as a runtime, a path
with roads, stop signs or red lights. Yeah. And I want to also talk about a
little bit about, we were talking about this for a while. Every time we met, we
were like, hey, man, are we going back to tech or are we going back to unemployment?
Well, what are we going to do? Because we were trading together for quite some time.
We were crazy. Yeah, we were trading. We were successful in that. And we were like,
okay, listen, like, should we go back? Yeah. You know, and I just felt like I
can't go back. I don't know why. No, you know, it was something that was dragging
me or forcing me. And we had this conversation so many times at that time. I
think it was a sort of a fatigue of being promised something in an industry. And I'm
not saying that we're sort of, we expected something from somebody else, but it was a
fatigue of the sort of regurgitation of the same type of thinking in this
industry, right? Yeah. The hype and the whole, you know, massive amount of money,
investment, VCs and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. It was sort of, we got tired
a little bit about it, but we needed to make something that was ours. That we
could trust, that we were genuinely used as people, right? Yeah. And I come from
the philosophy where, you know, in my head, I'm imagining something like you say
something. So this was my experience. I was sitting at home and I had a microphone
and I had the whisper flow installed on my book. Yeah. And I was like, I'm having a
conversation in the microphone and I'm looking at the screen and I'm seeing the
output of that conversation. Sure. And then it just hit me like, okay, this is
for real. This is, this is happening today, right now at this moment. And from
that, I just felt if that's possible for me to be able to construct and give an
intent of something that I want to happen or create. Yeah. Yeah. And it comes also
from the Islamic philosophy where God says, kun faya kun, be and it becomes.
Yeah. And you can now see that in AI and technology that as a human being, you can
say something and it's building and creating this. Yeah. It was so powerful
for me that I just felt like I have to go all into this new technology. Right. And
actually see if, if this is real. Right. And that's, I think where naturally I
asked you like, Hey, is this real? Or, you know, is this happening? Just as a non
-engineer. Where now I could actually sit with Raju, who is like a fully fledged
full stack engineer and code and build and do the things as you. I remember that. I
remember that when I asked you, I was like, Hey, you need to go into GitHub and
you need to start talking with the agents. And you were like a little bit hesitant.
And you were like, what do you mean? I'm a CEO. I work with different stuff, you
know? But I was like, I was like, Hey, there is no CEO anymore, man. It's just,
everyone is the same now. Everyone has the power. Or it's just about how much
experience and knowledge you have in your mind that you can. It quickly became to me
is that, yes, I was using AI and agents and I was working as a product manager for
another company, but not fully understanding the sort of capacity of this
tech. Because it was all unknown for all of us. I think it become now more apparent
that it's an extension of my mind and brain. I had to be a better CEO while
doing it. What is a CEO if it's not somebody's holding the vision to an
account? Yeah. Right? Making sure that whatever organization that we're doing is
profitable. And I could see that type of work coming in where I can have one or two
people with me who are intelligent in the way that they make judgment. Rather than
work, they're actually good at judgment. And just give them those tools and those
tools become an extension of their fingers and minds and everything else. And with
Midfleet, we can look at sort of guaranteeing an outcome or working towards
an outcome has become more of a reality. Yeah. And I think going forward, the
vision and the long-term goal as, you know, for Midfleet is I'm thinking that
you can be anybody. You can be whoever you want to be. You can be a big enterprise
organization. Or you can just be a one single founder of, you know, maybe a two,
just like us. Yeah. And you can go into Midfleet and you can say, hey, this is the
intent. This is the outcome I want. And you can actually see that progress. And
you can really see that coming to reality. And that's what I want to build for. I
want to build for a generation where you have an idea. You know, instead of having
this seat or this position that I came from, maybe you also came from where you
have to listen to people, you know, telling you stuff that maybe you don't
want to do, but you have to do it. And just coming out from that environment and
saying, hey, I'm capable. I have the intelligence and, you know, ideas that I
want something real to come out of that. So a little bit, I want to empower people.
I want to empower, you know, you, you know, to be able to create something. And
that's my intent for Midfleet, at least personally. Yeah, for sure. Like the
ultimate vision of Midfleet is you're in the driver's seat, right? You can build
whatever you want, whether it's engineering, sales, marketing, or calling
your mom, as we said. But you put the rules of the engagement. You make sure
that the agents actually deliver what they're supposed to do, right? So, yeah,
with that, we have a couple of ways that you can work with Midfleet. And it's, you
know, you can sign up for free, try it out, or get in touch with us. And our team
will help you get on board with all the work that you need to be done with agents.
Yeah. And thank you, guys. Thank you for watching. And I'm really looking forward
to working with Ahmed and see where this is going. And also with you guys, you
know, contact us. And we're here to support you, you know, on the onboarding
and the journey as well to Midfleet. So just feel free to go in and contact us.
And there is a chat box that you can just, you know, communicate with us. So, yeah.