Meet Kishan Bagaria the tech whiz kid from Assam who sold his app Text.com to WordPress.com owner Matt Mulleng for $50 mn

Kishan from Dibrugarh in Assam. He is class 10 pass and never went to college.

By Oineetom Ojah and Ripunjoy Das

Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, co-founders of Instagram now owned by Meta, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, the founders of WhatsApp, Pavel Durov, the founder and owner for another messaging app Telegram. Now to this list add the name of Kishan Bagaria.

Twenty-six year old Kishan Bagaria the tech whiz kid from Dibrugarh in Assam, developed a messaging app named Texts.com and joined the elite club of techies, a select bunch of world class top notch software developers. But the bigger news, Kishan’s app was bought for a whopping $50 million (in rupee terms its over Rs 400 crore) and the buyer is Matt Mulleng, the owner of WordPress.com and Tumblr.
This Durga Puja was surely special for Kishan’s parents – mom Kavita and dad Mahendra Bagari. The good news about their son’s big achievement came during the Durga Puja festivities.

Speaking to Northeast Live, Kishan’s father said, “Never expected it will be such a big deal. We are very happy. But we see this just as the beginning. We want him to continue working and developing more apps”.

Kishan started working on Texts.com as a side project back in 2020. He noticed there were too many messaging apps and he wanted to build one for himself. He shared a prototype with his friends. They were very excited and started using the app. Soon word spread about the app and the app became popular. A lot of industry experts noticed it too.

So how does Texts.com work?

It aggregates all other messaging apps into one view, rather than being a new platform itself. It connects to Whatsapp/Instagram/Twitter and nearly every other major service. It also gives people a bunch of new features like being able to see messages without letting the recipients know.

Kishan’s early days:

Kishan studied upto Class 8 in Don Dosco School, Dibrugarh and then did his Class 9 and 10 from Agrasen Academy, Dibrugarh. In Kishan’s own words, he never went to college. Kishan was raised by the internet and learnt everything, all his skills from the net.

Kishan always wanted to create a company. He has been developing small windows apps since he was 12: Creating things is just intrinsically fun for him. He moved to San Francisco in January this year because he always wanted to be with the tech community.

In a mail response, Kishan shared about how he and his parents felt regarding the deal.

“I didn’t tell them (his parents) any numbers, just that a deal happened and the company ownership has changed. The deal took 3 months to finalize and in that time I went through excitement, stress, numbness, indifference, gratitude and everything in between. My parents saw the headline number on the news like everyone else did. I wasn’t there when they saw it. I imagine them to have felt happy and secure.”

Asked what his next plans are, Kishan said, “I’m going to continue to work on Texts.com — there’s a lot we can build and the vision hasn’t been fully executed.”

Kishan’s younger brother, who also is in the US, is into crypto marketing and he too has developed apps. Both Bagaria brothers are set to rock the app world.

COMMENTS