Twelve months ago, I was working at a neurotechnology startup when I started to, for lack of a better word, get a bit icked out by the venture-backed, increasingly soulless state of the industry. Every company began to feel like a copy of the next, as if they were all simultaneously writing and following the same shared Google Doc called Startup Playbook. On paper, every product was “the world’s first,” “revolutionary,” or “life-changing.” In reality, many of them weren’t.
When you really look at consumer health tech, the products we use, try, abandon, or worship, you start to notice how well marketed they are. But if you sit with yourself for a second and ask what they’ve actually given you, you might realise how much you were sold on the idea of change, rather than the thing itself.
And in many cases, they don’t just fail to deliver, they take something away. The industry slowly hijacks our intuition. It convinces us that we need an app to tell us how to sleep, eat, think, feel. When to rest, when to push, when to set boundaries, when to question a relationship. The algorithms get so good at mirroring us that we start to believe they understand us better than we understand ourselves. Over time, you outsource that knowing.
Anyway, I digress. Going back to my origin story.
During my time at the neurotechnology startup, I spent a lot of time looking into natural approaches to chronic health conditions, initially just to help me market the solution we were selling. And what kept coming up, or rather, what kept calling to me, were studies on yoga, meditation, and Ayurveda. I found myself drawn to their capacity to heal a range of chronic and mental health conditions, relying only on the body and its environment.
I even started to feel a sense of pride reading about them. This was the science of my ancestors. And I kept asking: why aren’t there more studies on this? Why are they so often dismissed as pseudoscience?
At the same time, at home, my algorithm started to tailor itself to a niche of “natural healthcare,” and I found myself going down endless rabbit holes, from influencers streaming about the dangers of hormonal contraceptives to early “chinamaxxing” content. The more I looked, the more I kept coming across the same idea: whilst modern medicine and tech has undeniably helped us answer how to live longer, it hasn’t always helped us answer how to live better.
And when I really took a hard look at my life, I might have had a great job, all the wearables and tools on my fingers, head, feet, and brain, but I wasn’t really feeling great. More than that, I had started to trust the marketing of promising companies so much that I stopped asking myself: what actually makes a life feel good to live?
I couldn’t find those answers where I was. So I quit my job and went looking for them at home, in India.
The idea for Jñāna was a kind of homecoming. A return to ideas I had spent years studying, postcolonial theory, socio-cultural critique, and documentary filmmaking that explored stories of injustice and inequity. It was also a personal homecoming: physically, creatively, intellectually.
It was also something I was vehemently told not to do.
The wellness app space, many of those close to me said, was already saturated. Yoga alone has millions of creators, platforms, and products. Where would I find my place? They weren’t wrong. But something felt distinctly missing.
What I found back at home was both profound and confronting. These were living traditions, taught by people who had spent most of their lives studying, practising, and embodying them. And yet, when translated into global wellness culture, so much of that depth had been flattened.
Yoga is perhaps the clearest example. It is not simply a workout; it’s an ancient system of living. But today, most of us are only seeing a fraction of that. I, for one, even as an Indian, have often struggled to access a version of the practice that goes beyond the physical, something that reflects both my own lack of awareness and an industry that enables it.
Jñāna is my attempt to bring more context back into these practices, because from what I’ve seen so far, that context is what allows them to actually transform you. It’s also an attempt to bring greater visibility and support to the teachers closest to the source, who, somewhat ironically, have been underrepresented.
As a digital platform built with India’s leading teachers across yoga, meditation, breathwork, and philosophy, we’ve tried to create something that prioritises perspective and context over optimisation and addictive scrolling. This means many of the classes aren’t designed to be repeated endlessly or gamified into streaks. Some you might only watch once. But if they stay with you, if they shift how you see something or how you respond to your own life, then they’ve done their job.
Next, check out this shoot of South Asians reclaiming visibility.