Rohan Pavuluri

Present

Rohan Pavuluri

I live in New York City, where I’m the Chief Business Officer at Speechify, the largest consumer AI voice platform in the world. We have 50M+ users and regularly rank #1 on AI voice model leaderboards. I lead work across AI research, growth, and product, and spend a lot of my time building our team.

I’m also the board chair, founder, and served as CEO for Upsolve, which has relieved over $1 billion in debt for low-income families in America as the TurboTax for consumer bankruptcy. I came up with the idea to build Upsolve while doing statistics research with Professor Jim Greiner and personally coded the first version. We’re fortunate to have raised tens of millions of dollars in support from Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, Vinod Khosla, Jack Dorsey, Chris Sacca, Y Combinator, the U.S. government, OpenAI, and several of the most prominent entrepreneurs and investors around. Upsolve is the largest consumer legal technology platform built in the last 15 years in America.

Alongside our technology platform, I came up with the idea and led a landmark First Amendment legal challenge to century-old laws in America that limited who could provide legal advice to lawyers alone. These laws guarantee that low-income families don’t get the help they need, because demand far outstrips supply and lawyers are expensive. They made me very angry, so I spent a lot of time studying their history and found a way to fight them. We won a landmark First Amendment victory in Upsolve v. New York, and the case is currently working its way through the courts after New York State appealed it.

The case also started a national movement, with follow-on cases across the country using our legal strategy. It has also brought together advocacy groups that agree on almost nothing else, including the NAACP, the Cato Institute, and the Manhattan Institute, along with 20+ law professors. The Institute for Justice has the full history.

For fun, I sometimes invest in friends who have founded companies like Juicebox (best AI recruiting), Verse Medical (best AI medical supplies), and Speechify, before I joined.

I grew up in downtown Chicago, spent four years at Phillips Exeter, and studied statistics at Harvard. I’ve spent most of my time since college in New York, with stints in London and San Francisco. As a founder, exec, and investor, I’ve always been excited by ideas that can combine social impact and economic value.

Growing up, my fun fact was that I was born in Melbourne, Australia. My parents moved over a dozen times across three countries, from India to New Zealand, then New Zealand to Australia, then Australia to the United States, each time seeking a place with the most opportunities for their kids.

I’ve always viewed the goal of my projects as: X axis = number of lives I can impact, Y axis = depth of impact. Maximize the area under the curve. I’m also a big fan of taking on problems that wouldn’t otherwise get solved if it weren’t for them, what I call the wins above replacement philosophy of life.

number of lives I can impact depth of impact

Interests

Consumer technology. Highly regulated industries. AI for biology (my parents, my wife, and my brother are all physicians, and my first career aspiration as a kid was becoming a neurosurgeon). Reshaping how talented people decide what to work on. Tri-sector athletes. Challenging occupational licensing. Early stage investing & public markets activism. Walkable cities.

Writing and Talks

An app that empowers people to solve their legal problems · TED

A TED talk I gave as a TED Fellow, now viewed over 1.5 million times.

A conversation with Neil Devani · Podcast

A conversation I had with my friend Neil Devani, founder of Necessary Ventures.

How to Avoid the Well-Trodden Path · The Harvard Crimson

I published this while I was in college. A lot of people I didn’t know reached out after it ran, so I figured it’s worth sharing here.

Selected Press

Past Boards

Contact

Email me, or find me on X and LinkedIn.

Always Happy to Meet People Taking on Problems That Wouldn’t Get Solved Without Them