Raju Khunt

Raju founded Emperor Brains in 2020 around a simple frustration: too much software is built by people who never have to live with the consequences. The answer was a company that ships its own products — and holds client work to the same standard it holds its own revenue to.

Six years on, that idea runs at scale: a 30+ person engineering team serving companies across the US, UK, and Europe, multi-year dedicated-team relationships with household-name US brands, and two products of the company’s own in production — Nipige, a marketplace platform handling 35M invoices a month, and Sourceable, an AEO platform running agents against four LLM engines around the clock.

He writes here about the unglamorous parts of the business — what things actually cost, when not to build, and why honesty is cheaper than surprises.