From Surat to Silicon: The Story of Rocket

Under the shadows of diamond polishing wheels and textile looms where innovation used to be laughed off as a Mumbai or Bangalore thing three mavericks dared to bend the software creation rules. Vishal Virani, Rahul Shingala and Deepak Dhanak – names which were met with scepticism in investor board rooms – hail from the nondescript streets of Surat and have today built Rocket, an AI-powered platform that converts casual ideas into ready-to-use apps. 

Their path was no polished pitch deck; it was a gritty ascent full of disbelief, sleepless nights and an unwavering conviction that geography should never place a cap on ambition. It's the unvarnished odyssey of founders who confirmed that real disruption is steeped in the neglected byways of India.

The Hidden Spark: From Family Firsts to Code Rebels in a Textile Town

Surat, the vibrant centre of the gem and fabric industry in Gujarat, is not one that most people associate with high tech. Still, it was in 2021 that visited Vishal Virani, the first engineer in his family, makes his way to meet Rahul Shingala and Deepak Dhanak.

What started as off-the-cuff conversations in the city’s frenetic markets blossomed into a collective fixation: making it easier to build apps in an increasingly complex world.
Vishal, who had his background in hacking on technology locally, added a product-sense that had been shaped from early days doing UI.

Rahul takes on the SaaS CTO role where he translates his deep dives into backend architectures into a service to help you transform your abstract algorithms into concrete tools. Deepak, as his COO, provided operational stability and was equipped to grow teams in the face of limited resources. And now they have founded DhiWise, a platform to simplify developer workflows and automate the generation of code from designs such as Figma files.

Early Bets That Felt Like Gambles

Their initial foray wasn't about flashy AI hype; it was a pragmatic fix for the drudgery of manual coding. DhiWise focused on the front-end developers annoyed by redundant work, offering quicker turnarounds from wireframes to production code. In those early days, the three hustled from a tiny Surat office, relying on open source libraries and making no small amount of sweat equity to develop a prototype that garnered early whispers of interest among indie developers.

But the real test loomed: Could a Surat squad compete in a global arena dominated by Ivy League pedigrees and coastal accelerators?

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The Brutal Grind Behind DhiWise's Rise

Building DhiWise exposed the stark underbelly of Indian entrepreneurship—where talent meets invisible barriers. The founders pitched tirelessly, only to face arched eyebrows at their accents and outright dismissal of their base. "Surat? For global software?" became a refrain in virtual calls, as VCs fixated on their lack of elite alma maters or Silicon Valley stamps.

Nights That Blurred into Dawn: The Silent Hustle

Long hours were a part of their everyday life. Vishal would stay up late nights coding, working on features, and ducking family hopes for a ‘stable’ job. Rahul struggled to work in early-stage AI models, hitting barriers as datasets were inadequate to the task of producing dependable results. Deepak balanced vendor wrangling and team hiring, with the company’s burn rate breathing down their necks. Funding rounds dragged, and bootstrapping every rupee — skipping meals, pushing out prototypes, deferring dreams.

But resilience led to breakthroughs. With a proprietary dataset of 10 million+ Figma-to-code pairs, DhiWise is riding the solid wave of solopreneurs and small agencies. Users loved how it cut their development time, but scaling remained a mirage. Deeper-pocketed competitors poured in, necessitating endless pivots.

Read also- Aurva: Redefining Data Security with India’s Bold Startup Vision

The Pivot Point: Acquisition as a Bitter-Sweet Lifeline

In a twist that validated their grit, DhiWise caught the eye of Integrio Systems, a U.S.-based firm specializing in enterprise software. The acquisition, though terms remain under wraps, injected capital and credibility but demanded a hard reset. The founders saw it not as an endpoint, but a launchpad—absorbing lessons on enterprise needs while retaining control over their vision. This chapter closed DhiWise's standalone run, but it ignited the embers for something bolder: an AI-native evolution.
From Code Generators to Vibe Architects: The Vision That Birthed Rocket.new

Post-acquisition, the trio didn't rest on laurels. They zeroed in on a seismic shift: the rise of "vibe-coding," where natural language prompts replace rigid syntax. Rocket.new emerged as their manifesto—a platform that doesn't just spit out snippets but orchestrates entire production-ready applications, websites, and dashboards.

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Decoding the "Vibe" Revolution

At its core, Rocket.new blends large language models from leaders like Anthropic, OpenAI, and google with custom deep learning tuned on their DhiWise archives. Users describe an idea—"Build a fintech dashboard for real-time analytics"—and within minutes, it delivers deployable code complete with modules for security, scalability, and UI polish. This addresses pains overlooked by rivals: maintenance, updates, and integration, not just initial builds.
The vision? Democratize creation entirely. Product managers, solopreneurs, and even non-coders could bypass traditional hurdles, fostering a world where ideas deploy at the speed of thought. From Surat's vantage, they eyed global inequities—why should only elite teams build fast?—and engineered Rocket.new to level that field.

Lightning in a Bottle: A Global Surge from a Local Dream

Launched in beta just months ago, Rocket.new exploded organically. Word-of-mouth on developer forums and viral social shares propelled it to hundreds of thousands of users across numerous countries, with thousands of paid subscribers churning out countless apps. Major corporations joined the fold, validating its enterprise chops—e-commerce platforms, fintech tools, and a surge in mental health apps.

The Funding Shockwave: Proving Doubters Wrong

Skeptics who once scoffed now clamored. In a seed round led by Salesforce Ventures, with Accel and Together Fund piling in, Rocket.new secured significant funding—all equity, no dilution drama. This influx, announced mere weeks after beta, underscores a pivot from whispers to roar: strong revenue streams from the U.S., Europe, and India.

Scaling Shadows: New Horizons Amid Looming Storms

With Palo Alto as their U.S. base, and the engineering team in India poised to double, the founders brace for hypergrowth—eyeing aggressive revenue targets by mid-next year. Still, there are challenges: optimising generation speeds vs. nimbler opponents; protecting proprietary models from copycats; and finding the company's way through AI's ethical miasma.

Vishal, Rahul, and Deepak's journey from scepticism in Surat to worldwide stages underscores a fundamental truth: Ingenuity flourishes on defiance, not destinations. Their narrative isn't polished victory; it's a tribute to visions shaped in adversity, catapulting Rocket.new to a tomorrow where each "vibe" lights up reality. In Asia's startup tapestry, these three threads are weaving a bolder pattern — after one rejection at a time.