Sacrena is the first thing I have built that uses everything I know.
The technical half comes from a decade of data and ML in production: computer engineering at Mumbai University, a masters in business analytics and machine learning at the University of South Florida, then healthcare, insurance, and enterprise systems, including architecting the data layers one of the largest US hospital systems runs on. Semantic views AI agents can consume, sepsis prediction, pipelines that move clinical records without losing their meaning.
That craft, moving meaning between systems intact, is what Sacrena runs on. Except now the systems are two people.
The idea of a space for spiritual connection had been with me for a while. I did not entertain it. It sounded like the kind of thing that sounds good and goes nowhere.
Then I did my 200-hour yoga teacher training in Costa Rica, under Jonah Kest. Forty people came from all over the world. What stayed with me was not the practice. It was what people said once the day was done. So many of them felt free there in a way they did not feel at home. A woman from Canada told me that where she lived, people called her practice demonic, so she hid it. A few Americans from smaller towns said the same thing in different words. They had each built a whole inner life they could not talk about.
So I asked the room a question. If you had a space to meet your tribe and be fully yourself, no hiding, would you use it? Forty people, every one of them, lit up. That was the moment Sacrena stopped being a someday idea.
Dating apps are optimized for volume and dopamine, not for compatibility at the level of values, energy, and consciousness. The tools for inner work have grown sophisticated. The tools for finding a partner have not caught up. That gap is the whole reason Sacrena exists.
Vedic astrology, Human Design, numerology: I do not treat these as superstitions. They are frameworks for self-knowledge that have survived thousands of years of use. The real question is whether they can be translated into a product responsibly, without losing their depth or collapsing into entertainment. That is the engineering problem I find worth my life.
AI earns its place here for one reason: it can hold complexity and surface patterns across systems no person can manually cross-reference. Sacrena does not tell anyone who to date. It gives people the information to make that decision with more self-knowledge than they had before.
There is one more thing that shapes how I build, and it is not a spiritual one. In 2021 I co-founded MetaPlay, a blockchain launchpad. It was breached by the Lazarus Group, the North Korean state-sponsored unit behind more than $7 billion in cryptocurrency theft, including the Ronin Bridge and Bybit attacks. I am one of the founders to be interviewed in James Craig's Encrypted Films documentary on the group.
What matters is what it left me with. A founder who has been on the receiving end of a state-level attack treats user safety differently from a founder who has not. When I architect trust and safety for a consumer app, I am not working from a checklist. I am working from experience. The people in that room in Costa Rica were ready to be vulnerable in a way they never had been. Protecting that is not a feature. It is the whole responsibility.