How an alumna’s bus ride and class assignment led to a global AI company
Prukalpa Sankar's path from NTU to Atlan, the data platform now trusted by some of the world's largest enterprises, started with a two-day class assignment and a chance encounter on a bus.
Text: Vivien Yap | Photos: Prukalpa Sankar, HumanX
A headstart on ambition
Growing up in India, Prukalpa watched her mother build an education non-profit from the ground up. She still remembers the image of her mother working out of their family living room.
"I saw my mum working at midnight with her laptop open," she recalls. "I was in Grade 11, studying the hardest I had ever done in my life, and I still couldn't outwork her."
Prukalpa's mother also made her write yearly letters to herself. In one, written at 15, Prukalpa wrote down the names of entrepreneurs she admired and a dream: to build something of her own with the power to improve people’s lives. "I didn't know what it was back then, I just knew I wanted to build it," she says.
Prukalpa speaking at global AI conference, HumanX, in San Francisco on using AI in businesses and business intelligence.
Learning how to engineer solutions
Prukalpa eventually decided to study at NTU’s School of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology after being inspired by her seniors and their experiences at the university.
“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,” she says.
The bigger shift came in her second year when NTU's Minor in Entrepreneurship (MiE) programme tasked students with developing a business idea in two days.
"Through that module, I stopped complaining about things that were broken," she says. "I started seeing them as problems someone could solve."
A bus ride that changed everything
Prukalpa met her eventual co-founder, Varun Banka, by chance, seated next to him on a bus from NTU into town. They bonded over a shared interest in startups and, months later, decided to spend their final year testing business ideas together.
When their first idea, a mobile payments app, fell through, they pivoted fast.
Inspired by her childhood dream of building something with social impact, Prukalpa and Varun worked through a single overnight sprint and launched a crowdfunding campaign at 4am in the morning. A stranger contributed $100. That rush of building the first version of SocialCops remains one of Prukalpa's clearest memories.
What started out as a chance encounter on a bus ride out of NTU eventually grew into decades of collaboration for Prukalpa (right) and Varun (left).
For the rest of that year, she and Varun ran the business alongside their final-year projects, working through the night at the benches along NTU’s North Spine. They funded their first year of operations largely through prize money won at international business plan competitions.
From SocialCops to Atlan
SocialCops grew into a data intelligence company that supported developmental projects across more than 50 countries, working with the Government of India, UNICEF, the United Nations and more.
But success created its own ceiling. However effective SocialCops was in the field, the team was stretched thin sorting through messy backend data. Building an internal tool to fix their own data chaos led Prukalpa and Varun to their next company Atlan, where they help companies organise their data and other information for AI systems to understand and use.
Atlan now works with some of the world's largest financial and technology companies, including Mastercard, JPMorgan and Zoom. That vantage point shapes how she thinks about AI's effect on the workforce.
"Humans are not losing their jobs to AI," she says. "They are losing their jobs to other humans who use AI better." She believes young graduates, fresh out of school and unburdened by workplace habits, are most equipped to lead this shift.
Paying it forward
Despite building an international career, Prukalpa still responds when NTU students reach out, often with nothing more than a well-written email and a follow-up.
"People helped me when I had no path to follow. If I can do the same for someone else, I will,” she says.
It is the same instinct that sent her, as a teenager, searching for a problem worth solving. Nearly two decades on, she is still looking for the next one.
Come hear Prukalpa share more on her experience in innovation and AI at the NTU Tech Summit & Alumni Conference in Silicon Valley on 23 October 2026.
Know NTU alumni with a story worth telling? Write to us at u-alumnimag@ntu.edu.sg.
