From Guitar Prodigy to Startup Founder: Tamish Pulappadi’s Journey to YC and Beyond

Momentum is one of creativity's most valuable assets. Musicians, video editors, and painters all rely on it --- yet it can be easily disrupted when the work begins with gathering scattered materials instead of making something new.

Tamish Pulappadi understood this early. Growing up in Bengaluru, he was a teenager with a guitar nearly as tall as he was, driven first by music and later by technology. The interplay between those two languages would quietly shape his path.

Today, as CEO and co-founder of Cocreate, he leads a Y Combinator--backed effort to strip away the friction in video editing, giving creators more time and mental space for the work that matters.

A Life Tuned Between Art and Engineering

Pulappadi's instinct for finding such solutions comes from a life split between artistry and technical thinking. By the age of three, he had found his way to a guitar; a decade later, he became the youngest-ever Ernie Ball Music Man endorsee and the first Indian to earn that recognition. His inclusion in the Brotherhood of the Guitar placed him among the most promising young musicians globally, with Rolling Stone India and other outlets taking notice.

But the path was never purely musical. Alongside stage performances and recordings, Pulappadi nurtured an interest in systems and technology. This continued interest led him to Stanford University where, rather than zero in on one practice, he pursued dual degrees in Computer Science and Music Technology.

It was there, in rehearsal spaces and late-night work sessions, that the seeds of Cocreate took root.

Inside Cocreate

With Cocreate, Pulappadi addresses a truth many in video production know all too well: the creative process rarely begins with creativity.

Before an editor sets off to make proper cuts, hours are lost to the invisible groundwork: syncing audio from multiple sources, generating lower-resolution videos so the software doesn't crash from supporting heavy files, and sifting through sprawling, often disorganized folders of raw footage. These steps, no matter how essential they may be, ultimately drain energy before the real storytelling even starts, and frustrate professionals and hobbyists alike.

For Pulappadi and his Stanford classmates, Archish Arun and Sid Yu, these weren't just occasional nuisances; they were daily bottlenecks. The repetition slowed projects to a crawl, stifling momentum and breaking focus. All three were greatly aware of this problem firsthand, having juggled creative deadlines with the grind of technical prep work.

Cocreate was born from that resolve. Its technology is designed to blend into the background of an editor's workflow, taking over the repetitive but unavoidable steps that precede creative decision-making. The platform streamlines these steps by taking care of arduous tasks like labeling, audio syncing, proxy generation, and media storage --- tasks critical to project organization.

Through this behind-the-scenes hand-off, Cocreate frees editors to concentrate on framing shots, refining cuts, and coming up with a coherent visual flow, whether they are managing terabytes of footage for a professional production or putting together a short personal project.

The approach was deliberate: rather than building it as an alternative editing software, the team built Cocreate to function as an infrastructure layer, streamlining the organizational and technical setup that every project requires --- making the backend invisible so that the creative flow remains uninterrupted.

For teams dealing with high volumes of footage, this tool can fully turn the process from one defined by repetitive labor to one fueled by uninterrupted storytelling.

From Side Project to Startup

Launched in 2025, Cocreate has been steadily rising, recently being accepted into Y Combinator's Summer 25 batch. Under the guidance of mentors such as Gustaf Alstromer and Brad Flora, the team learned the steps needed to refine their vision and translate it into a sustainable business. The program also secured $500,000 in pre-seed funding, giving Pulappadi and his team access to tools that allowed them to further fine-tune the product and spread it across different channels.

For Pulappadi, the shift from student project to funded startup meant having to commit to solving this problem full-time. To make sure the end platform properly appealed to its user base, he and his team conducted multiple user interviews during early development and iterated the product based on their findings, with each cycle informed by the team's own creative work and feedback from editors and production teams.

Unlike many creator-focused products that chase trends or visual novelty, Cocreate's focus has stayed on what slows people down and how to remove those barriers without intruding on their craft.

Building Tools That Stay Out of the Way

This mission is personal for Pulappadi. His own creative thinking, whether in music or media, has always been shaped by how much of the process was consumed by non-creative tasks. His philosophy is clear: raise the ceiling for how efficient and fast professionals can be in a short timeframe, and lower the floor so non-technical creatives work with advanced tools (that they might otherwise not have access to) that allow them to execute ambitious ideas. Cocreate isn't a shortcut for artistry; it's a safeguard for it.

As the company grows, the product is evolving with its users. Pulappadi and his team remain closely connected to their early adopters, adjusting and expanding features to serve both large production environments and solo creators.

Through Cocreate, Tamish Pulappadi is developing a practical fix for video editors that aims to become an essential (yet invisible) layer in how media is shaped and packaged today.