From BITS Pilani to Silicon Valley, how this AI engineer is redefining customer support for ecommerce

“Cracking competitive exams like Joint Entrance Examination and Birla Institute of Technology and Science Admission Test opened doors to BITS Pilani, one of India’s premier engineering institutes,” recalls Kshitiz Parashar, Founding AI Engineer at Alhena, a SaaS startup transforming how ecommerce brands engage with their customers.

“Dorm rooms doubled as incubators and that vibe made starting a company feel normal,” he says, reflecting on his early years as a kid who loved concepts in Physics and Maths. Even as student loans loomed, he knew a 9-to-5 job was a just pit stop, not the destination.

In an increasingly saturated landscape of AI-powered customer service, most solutions still struggle to move beyond flashy demos and basic chatbots. But at Alhena, a breakthrough in AI engineering is reshaping what’s possible for ecommerce support. At the heart of this transformation is Parashar, whose innovations have helped propel the company from zero to seven figures in annual recurring revenue (ARR).

Parashar has built Alhena’s core AI agent framework from the ground-up, an intelligent system capable of handling real-world customer queries with minimal hallucination, deep brand training, and enterprise-grade reliability. The outcome: for some ecommerce brands, Alhena’s agents now resolve over 80% of incoming support queries, outperforming legacy chatbot platforms by as much as 10x in accuracy, efficiency, and sales impact.

Engineering beyond prototypes

“Everyone is building AI agents, but very few are putting them into real production environments at scale,” says Parashar. “What we’ve built isn’t just a prototype but a production-grade, multi-agent system that powers high-reliability support for ecommerce brands.”

While he is quick to credit his co-founders, Nagendra and Ashu for their vision and mentorship, it’s clear Parashar’s technical leadership has been instrumental in turning Alhena’s vision into reality.

At a time when most companies are still experimenting with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and scripted bots, Parashar’s contributions have made Alhena leapfrog the space through agent deployment that deeply understand brand context, respond intelligently, and scale with business growth. This success is rooted in innovations such as:

• A hallucination detection engine that reduces misinformation in responses.
• An AI agentic architecture designed to collaborate, escalate, and learn continuously.
• An advanced knowledge ingestion pipeline that auto-updates from product catalogs and customer feedback.

These systems don’t just automate replies but also help brands recover abandoned carts, reduce churn, and turn customer service into a revenue driver.

Lessons of grit, failure, and learning

Parashar’s professional journey began as a machine learning engineer in a major bank. “The work was intellectually interesting, but it lacked the real-world impact I craved for,” he says. So he teamed up with a co-founder to build smart traffic lights to address congestion in Indian cities, until COVID-19 disrupted everything.

After an early stint building smart city tech in India and a Master’s degree from University of California, Davis, he was a founding engineer at a voice assistant startup that was too early for the market. But the lessons were invaluable. “We failed fast, learned faster,” he reflects.

When the opportunity to join Alhena AI came up, it felt like a natural next step for the young founder. The mission was clear: help e-commerce businesses deploy reliable, production-ready AI agents. “Taking AI from prototypes to production has been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my career,” he shares.

Building with values

Ask Parashar what drives his work, and the answer is simple: ownership. “If you want to build something great, you have to own it end to end – from the initial idea through execution and beyond,” he shares. He is also quick to emphasize that failure is not the end; it’s a redirection. “Hard things lead to an easier life. Easy choices usually lead to harder times,” he states.

At its core, Alhena AI solves a painful and expensive problem in ecommerce: poor customer service. Brands lose sales and burn out support teams while shoppers abandon carts in frustration. Alhena flips this narrative by giving every merchant an AI agent that’s fast, reliable, and genuinely helpful; deflecting around 86% of tickets and recovering lost sales.

Vision and impact

Alhena’s growth is built not just on innovation but also on values. Every customer interaction goes through rigorous checks to ensure AI agents behave ethically, consistently, and safely. “Our agents are brand-aligned and human-aligned,” Parashar emphasizes. “That’s non-negotiable.”

The roadmap ahead is ambitious: go from seven to nine figures in ARR by becoming the de facto AI layer for ecommerce support worldwide. This means constant experimentation, rapid iteration, and staying ahead of the latest in LLMs, fine-tuning techniques, and agent architectures.

“Startups are about pace. If you’re not moving fast, you’re already behind,” he says.

Advice for aspiring AI builders

Asked what he would recommend to a 22-year-old looking to break into AI, Parashar is candid. “Join a startup where you can take real ownership. Learn fast. Solve actual problems. You’ll grow faster than you ever imagined,” he says.

With AI maturing rapidly and expectations rising even faster, Alhena’s story is a blueprint for how strong engineering, clear product focus, and relentless execution can turn cutting-edge research into transformative impact; and for Parashar, it’s just the beginning.