An NTU bus ride led to a global data company

Text: Vivien Yap | Photos: Prukalpa Sankar, Varun Banka
Updated: 28 October 2026

Prukalpa grew up watching her mother build an education non-profit from their family’s living room. She remembers seeing her mother work late into the night. 

“I was studying the hardest I had ever done in my life, and I still couldn’t outwork her.” Her mother also encouraged her to write a letter to herself each year. In one, written when Prukalpa was 15, she listed the entrepreneurs she admired and a dream: to build something that could change lives.

Varun grew up in eastern India without a computer at home. He found his way to one by spending hours at a local stockbroker’s office after the markets closed each afternoon, watching the staff work. 

“They didn’t let me touch it,” he recalls. “I just wanted to watch them use the computer.” He later used his school principal’s computer during lunch breaks to build the school’s first website.

Finding their way to NTU

Although they grew up in different parts of  India, both were drawn to NTU through the recommendations of their seniors.

Prukalpa says: “My seniors were filled with a sense of purpose. They loved what they were doing and what NTU offered in terms of research opportunities and overseas  immersion programmes.”

Varun was inspired by an NTU alumnus from his hometown who had gone on to start his own company. 

“He wasn’t one-dimensional,” Varun says. 

The alumnus showed Varun that an engineering education could open doors beyond a conventional career path. He decided early on that computer engineering at NTU was where he wanted to be.

Learning outside the classroom

At NTU, both spent their early years chasing hands-on experience over textbooks. In her second year, Prukalpa enrolled in NTU’s Minor in Entrepreneurship. One course challenged students to develop a business idea in two days. It changed how she saw the world. 

“After that, I stopped complaining about things that were broken,” she says. “I started seeing them as problems someone could solve.”

Varun found his own momentum through NTU’s Microsoft Student Partner programme and learnt to code well enough to land an internship building one of the first apps for the original Windows phone. 

In a class on microcontrollers, he combined gesture-tracking technology with a music assignment to build a gesture-based orchestra controlled by its user, going well beyond his professor’s brief. 

"The joy of creating something that didn’t previously work,” he says. “That’s what has always pulled me in.”

A life-changing meeting on a bus ride

Prukalpa and Varun eventually met by chance on a bus from NTU to town. They bonded over their shared interest in startups. 

The pair spent long hours on NTU benches working on school assignments and building their business.

In their final year at NTU, the pair began testing business ideas together, eventually creating SocialCops, a platform that 
crowdsourced data on problems governments were not tracking.

To fund their startup, the pair entered more than a dozen local and international student competitions and used their prize money to build the business while individually finishing their final-year projects. 

Both recall working through the night on benches along NTU’s North Spine, breaking only for breakfast at McDonald’s.

“We worked incredibly hard. But back then, we were so excited that it didn’t feel like hard work at all,” recalls Varun.

From Socialcops to Atlan

SocialCops went on to support development projects in more than 50 countries, working with the Government of India, UNICEF and the United Nations. 

As the company grew, the team encountered a new challenge: managing the large volumes of data behind its work. That experience pointed the founders towards a broader problem facing organisations: how to organise and make sense of increasingly complex data.

The answer became Atlan, a data and AI platform that helps companies organise and use their data. 

Atlan now works with companies including Mastercard, JPMorgan and Zoom, giving both founders a close view of how AI is reshaping work.

“Humans are not losing their jobs to AI,” Prukalpa says. “They are losing their jobs to other humans who use AI better.”

Passing it forward

Today, both founders continue to share what they have learnt with the next generation.

Varun and Prukalpa visiting their alma mater in 2022.

Varun credits his years of playing competitive cricket with teaching him a lesson he still applies when mentoring Atlan’s interns and employees, some of whom have gone on to become entrepreneurs.

“Team sports taught me that you don’t win individually,” he says. Prukalpa still makes time to reply to NTU students who reach out to her, including those she has never met. 

“People helped me when I had no path to follow,” she says. “If I can do the same for someone else, I will.” 

 

This article appeared in issue 8 of U, the NTU alumni magazine.