Maninder Singh Bawa — CTO

I believe AI will do to legal services what UPI did to payments — make it instant, accessible, and invisible. I'm building that future at Lawyered, where we just raised ₹8.5 Cr on Ideabaaz (the largest deal in Indian TV history). Our AI — LAILA — is a voice-first legal assistant helping drivers instantly understand if a challan is valid, what fine applies, and how to dispute it. No lawyer needed for the first interaction. The numbers: → 2M+ legal cases resolved → 600,000+ vehicles protected → 99% resolution rate → ₹60Cr+ saved for fleet operators But here's what excites me more than the metrics: we're proving that AI can work in low-trust, high-stakes domains — not just chatbots and content generation, but real decisions that affect people's livelihoods. My AI thesis: The next wave of AI isn't general-purpose assistants. It's vertical AI — deeply embedded in specific industries, trained on domain-specific data, solving problems that require regulatory and cultural context. India has unique opportunities here: legal-tech, agri-tech, healthcare, financial inclusion. The winners won't be those with the best models, but those with the best data moats and distribution. What I do: 🔹 Build — CTO at Lawyered, architecting LAILA and LOTS247 🔹 Evaluate — CTO at India Accelerator, conducting technical due diligence on AI startups across 225+ portfolio companies (including unicorns like Ola) 🔹 Teach — Passionate about system design and helping engineers think architecturally Previously: Director of Engineering at Delivery Hero (Singapore), Senior EM at Classplus (scaled to 4Cr+ DAUs), Software Consultant at McKinsey. Background: MTech in Data Science & ML (BITS Pilani) | Deep Learning & TensorFlow Specializations I write about: Applied AI in India, vertical AI opportunities, what separates AI startups that scale from those that don't, and lessons from evaluating 100+ tech startups. DM me about: AI startup evaluation, legal-tech, scaling AI in production, architecture reviews.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Legal-Tech and AI specialist with extensive experience in startup evaluation and technology leadership.

Location: Gurgaon, Haryana, India

Experience: 9 yrs 11 mos

Skills

Artificial Intelligence (ai)
Legal Technology
Technical Due Diligence
Early-stage Startups
Startups
Team Leadership
Engineering Management
Engineering Leadership

Career Highlights

Led the development of India's first voice-based legal assistant.
Achieved 99% resolution rate for legal cases.
Conducted technical due diligence for 225+ startups.

Work Experience

India Accelerator

Chief Technology Officer (5 mos)

Mentor And Evaluator (3 yrs 1 mo)

Lawyered

Chief Technology Officer (5 mos)

Delivery Hero

Director of Engineering (2 yrs 3 mos)

Senior Engineering Manager (5 mos)

Classplus

Senior Engineering Manager (7 mos)

IA Labs

Co-Founder and CTO (1 yr 8 mos)

McKinsey & Company

Software Consultant (2 yrs 8 mos)

Asergis Group

Senior Software Engineer (1 yr 1 mo)

KineticX Technologies

Software Engineer (11 mos)

CETPA Infotech Pvt. ltd.

Software Intern (1 yr 11 mos)

Education

Master of Technology - MTech at Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani

Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.) at Mimit Malout

Maninder Singh Bawa

CTO

Gurgaon, Haryana, India9 yrs 11 mos experience

AI EnabledAI ML Practitioner

Key Highlights

Led the development of India's first voice-based legal assistant.
Achieved 99% resolution rate for legal cases.
Conducted technical due diligence for 225+ startups.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Legal-Tech and AI specialist with extensive experience in startup evaluation and technology leadership.

Contact

Skills

Core Skills

Artificial Intelligence (ai)Legal TechnologyTechnical Due DiligenceEarly-stage StartupsStartupsTeam LeadershipEngineering ManagementEngineering Leadership

Other Skills

AI ConsultingAI StrategyAmazon Web Services (AWS)Angular.JSApache KafkaCC++CSSCode ReviewComputer ScienceCustomer ServiceData AnalysisData MiningData StructuresData Warehousing

About

Experience

India accelerator

2 roles

Chief Technology Officer

Promoted

Oct 2025 – Present · 5 mos · Gurugram, Haryana, India

India Accelerator is one of India's most active early-stage funds with 225+ portfolio companies. I'm the technical filter between pitch and check.
What I Do:
🔍 Technical Due Diligence — The Gatekeeper Role
Designed and execute technical evaluation framework for all potential investments
Conducted 100+ deep-dive assessments: architecture reviews, codebase audits, scalability analysis, team evaluation
Key decisions: Build vs. buy analysis, technical debt quantification, infrastructure cost projections, AI validity testing

Early-Stage StartupsGenerative AI for LeadershipTechnical Due Diligence

Mentor And Evaluator

Aug 2022 – Sep 2025 · 3 yrs 1 mo · Gurugram, Haryana, India

Track record: Startups I greenlit have a 3x higher survival rate than portfolio average
🤖 AI/ML Startup Specialist
Lead evaluator for AI-focused investments — assessed 50+ companies claiming AI/ML capabilities
Developed internal playbook: "Real AI vs. Fake AI: A 60-Minute Technical Assessment"
Evaluation framework:
Data moat: Proprietary data or public datasets anyone can access?
Model depth: Custom training or API wrapper around OpenAI?
Inference economics: Cost per prediction vs. revenue per transaction
Team capability: ML engineers or prompt engineers?

Artificial Intelligence (AI)StartupsAI ConsultingGo-to-Market Strategy

Lawyered

Chief Technology Officer

Oct 2025 – Present · 5 mos · Gurugram, Haryana, India · On-site

Architected LOTS247 — India's first 24×7 roadside legal-tech SaaS platform
Built ChallanPay — unified challan discovery, resolution, and tracking across all Indian states
Leading LAILA integration — AI-powered voice-based legal assistant
Tech stack powering 7CR+ vehicles, 2M+ cases resolved, 75,000+ lawyers network
Just secured ₹8.5 crore on Ideabaaz — the largest single deal in Indian TV history

Artificial Intelligence (AI)Legal TechnologyVoice AiTechnology LeadershipAI Strategy

Delivery hero

2 roles

Director of Engineering

Promoted

Sep 2023 – Dec 2025 · 2 yrs 3 mos · Singapore

Senior Engineering Manager

Mar 2023 – Aug 2023 · 5 mos · Singapore

Classplus

Senior Engineering Manager

Aug 2022 – Mar 2023 · 7 mos · Gurugram, Haryana, India · Hybrid

Leading Classplus Web Architecture change from Monolith to Microservices to support 4 CR plus daily active users.
Rearchitected the existing Notification system to support 1 lakh notifications per second.
Leading & Managing the Web Team having 20+ Software Engineers

React.jsApache KafkaTeam LeadershipNext.jsNode.jsGoogle Cloud Platform (GCP)+3

Ia labs

Co-Founder and CTO

Dec 2020 – Aug 2022 · 1 yr 8 mos · India · Hybrid

Managing End to End product development including a various suite of products like the Learning management system, Customer reporting portal, and Admin portal
Managing product development team, guiding them, giving feedback, setting goals, reviewing and handling appraisals for the team
Mentoring different startups on their technology stack and system architecture design.
Gathering technical training requirements from corporates & curating a learning solution that fits the needs
Ensuring customer success for corporate training by efficiently providing training curriculum and assessments

Amazon Web Services (AWS)NoSQLREST APIsEngineering LeadershipComputer Science

Mckinsey & company

Software Consultant

Apr 2018 – Dec 2020 · 2 yrs 8 mos · Gurugram, Haryana, India · On-site

Getting the Internal products such as McKinsey Profiles, Intranet Search, Expertise Search, TRM revamped with a robust architecture & newer technology stack i.e Java + React
Proposed a new idea in a hackathon i.e LeoBot (An AI-based feedback chatbot) and got that productized as enterprise SaaS and used by more than 20 different product teams

Stakeholder ManagementOrganizational LeadershipEngineering Leadership

Asergis group

Senior Software Engineer

Mar 2017 – Apr 2018 · 1 yr 1 mo · Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India · On-site

Move the existing audio conferencing solution for corporates from PHP stack to Node React Microservices Architecture
Design the technical architecture for new version of Synthesis that would include Audio, Video conferencing, Messaging, Cloud Telephony, and Contact Center applications.

Kineticx technologies

Software Engineer

Mar 2016 – Feb 2017 · 11 mos · Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India · On-site

Collaborated with UX designer to convert the designs into reality
Delivered Fully Responsive application using Bootstrap and Scss
Used TDD approach to develop application and write unit tests using Jest, Enzyme.
implemented various Filters with multi-faceted search capability and also various other features.
Architected the complete revamp from earlier PHP based system to MicroServices based React, Node Architecture.
Built reusable frontend components and libraries and integrated frontend with GraphQL Backend.
Implemented Authentication and Authorization in API-Gateway that could stitch multiple Graphql Schemas of different microservices.

Cetpa infotech pvt. ltd.

Software Intern

Mar 2014 – Feb 2016 · 1 yr 11 mos · Noida Area, India

Built the complete app from scratch to end for both Android and Ios Platforms.
Developed an interactive user interface of the app using styled-components and managed the state using MobX.
Also developed the backend for the application using Express as server and MongoDB as database to store user's data.
Delivered everything single-handedly from development to deployment