S12 E16: Nikunj Bajaj, True Foundry

Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Noah Labhart - Startup Founder & CTO

News, Business, Careers, Entrepreneurship, Tech News, Technology

5.0 • 217 Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2026

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Nikunj Bajaj was born in India, and completed his undergraduate studies there. The intrigue of Silcon Valley in 2013 brought him to the Bay Area, where he got his masters degree from Berkeley. His studies and his time after school supremely informed what he is building now, at his current venture. But outside of tech, he is an outdoorsey person, enjoying running, biking and scuba diving, with his favorite place to dive being Bali. He enjoys playing board games with his friends, and listens to a lot of audiobooks from a wide range of genres. After joining Meta, Nikunj realized that building machine learning models for the company is different than using public ecosystems. The realized early on that machine learning models will hit an inflection point, where the stacks will need to change and adapt. He and his team decided to take on this challenge ahead of that inflection point. This is the creation story of True Foundry. Our Sponsors: * Check out Cash App and use my code CASHAPP10 for a great deal: https://click.cash.app/ui6m/mt82fpxl #CashAppPod. Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App’s bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. See terms and conditions at https://cash.app/legal/us/en-us/card-agreement. Cash App Green, overdraft coverage, borrow, cash back offers and promotions provided by Cash App, a Block, Inc. brand. Visit http://cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures. * Check out Plaud AI and use my code CODESTORY for a great deal: https://plaud.ai Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode is brought to you by The Built. A new podcast from the guys behind Cincera,
0:04.7	Michael Sullivan and Ian Myers. They built their company by figuring out clever solutions to a few
0:09.8	important ad tech problems in their industry. And that's exactly what this show is about.
0:15.2	Mike and Ian interview some of the smartest tech minds in the biz to hear about how they
0:19.8	identified opportunities, solve their hardest challenges, and grew their businesses in the biz to hear about how they identified opportunities, solve
0:21.6	their hardest challenges, and grew their businesses in the process. Listen to the build with
0:27.1	Michael Sullivan, wherever you get your podcasts. True Foundry provides an enterprise grade AI Gateway product.
0:39.3	And our AI Gateway definition is slightly broader than the industry.
0:43.3	So we encompass something called an LLM Gateway, MCP Gateway and Agent Gateway.
0:48.3	Think of these three as three components, LLMs, MCPs and sub-agents to build your agentic applications.
0:55.0	AI Gateway literally sits in the middle of your traffic to every single API call that you're making to your LLMs and agents.
1:03.0	And if something sits in the critical path of your request, you want to make sure that piece of software always stays up.
1:10.0	So we actually chose a design principle that is called a split plane architecture.
1:15.1	My name is Nick Inj Bajaj. I'm co-founder CEO at True Foundry.
1:20.9	This is Code Story.
1:23.6	A podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries.
1:26.6	I've been six months moonlighting. There's nothing on the backhand. Who share what it takes to change in industry. I don't exactly know what to do next. She took many goes to get right. Who built the teams that have their back. A company is its people. The teams help each other achieve more. Most proud of our team. Keeping scalability top of mind. Yes, we've been fighting it as we grow. Total waste of time. The stories you don't read in the headlines. It's not an easy thing to achieve, my dude. Take off the shelf and dusted it off and tried to begin. Dry the ups and downs of the startup life. You need to really want it.
2:01.9	It's not just about technology.
2:03.3	All this and more on Code Story.
2:06.9	I'm your host, Noah Lab Partner.
2:08.8	And today, how Nakunj Pajaj has built an enterprise-ready platform
2:13.3	with a target AI gateway and agenic deployment.
	...

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