-- FOUNDERS
The Boy Who Coded the Cosmos
Inside Retrograde, the AI Vedic astrology platform a Bangalore twelfth-grader built with Jothishi's Anand Vadakepat — and the backward-moving planet that gave it a name
By the Retrograde Editorial Team
On most evenings, Pranav is doing what any twelfth-grader in Bangalore is doing: finishing homework, half-watching a match, arguing with a sibling about the remote. On the side, in the hours everyone else spends scrolling, he has been building something considerably stranger than a school project — an AI system trained to read a birth chart the way a serious Vedic astrologer would, and answer, in plain language, the questions people are usually too anxious or too far from an astrologer's calendar to ask out loud.
It's called Retrograde ( www.retrograde.co.in ), and its origin story is less “startup pitch” and more “an observation that wouldn't leave him alone.” Pranav kept noticing the same gap: people wanting a real, considered answer about a marriage, a job offer, a move abroad — and the only people equipped to give one, working astrologers who actually study a full chart, were booked out for weeks. “I had access to the same tools every developer has right now,” he says. “AI, large language models, a laptop. It felt strange not to use them for something that actually mattered to people.”
That “something” needed a deeper foundation than a chatbot with a horoscope script bolted on, which is where Anand Vadakepat comes in. Vadakepat had already spent years building the astrology engine behind Jothishi.com, grounded in classical method — the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra, Jaimini's sutras, a person's Nakshatra placements, every divisional chart from D1 through D60, the dasha timing systems, Ashtakvarga strength scoring, Panchanga. It is, by design, the opposite of a sun-sign horoscope. “Sun-sign horoscopes give the same twelve answers to millions of different birth charts,” Vadakepat says. “That's entertainment, not astrology.” Pranav and Vadakepat began talking, and what started as a shared frustration turned into a working platform — a teenager's instinct for what people actually wanted paired with an engine built on decades of classical technique.
“Retrograde is that pause — the moment someone stops, turns inward, and reconsiders before moving forward again. That's exactly the moment we built this for.”
— Pranav
There's a reason the name stuck. Seen from Earth, planets ordinarily seem to travel in one steady direction, what astronomers call direct motion — until, every so often, one appears to slow, halt, and drift backward across the sky. It's an optical illusion, really, a trick of relative orbital speed, but Vedic astrology has always had a word for it: Vakri gati, retrograde motion. Ketu, the lunar south node, is treated as perpetually reversed, moving opposite every other planet in the heavens. Pranav and Vadakepat liked what that implied. Not indecision — reflection. The pause before someone chooses which way to go.
It is also, in its own way, a story about timing of a different kind. A sixteen-year-old and one collaborator building and shipping a genuinely complete AI-driven astrology platform would have been unthinkable even a few years ago; it would have taken a team, a runway, an office. “This is what's newly possible in the age of the one-person company,” Vadakepat says. “AI and large language models let a small team do what used to take an entire startup.” Pranav, for his part, seems less interested in the novelty of his age than in getting the thing right. Ask him what Retrograde can actually be used for and the answer is almost mundane in its practicality: career decisions, marriage timing, health, money, whether to take the leap and move abroad — “basically anything someone would want a second, informed opinion on,” he says. “Those are exactly the decisions people find hardest to get real guidance on quickly.”
Underneath the product talk is a fairly unfashionable belief, one both founders return to without much prompting: that clearer decisions, made with less anxiety, add up to happier lives. Not a guarantee, not a fortune-telling promise — just the conviction that people making career changes, choosing partners, weighing financial risk, deserve access to the kind of depth an astrologer's full attention would give them, without the wait. Early users appear to be finding Retrograde largely by word of mouth, the kind of quiet trust that spreads when an answer resonates with someone's actual life rather than reading like a recycled prediction.
Ahead, the plan is simply to go deeper — more astrological coverage, a fuller web and mobile experience — without cutting the corners that got Retrograde here in the first place. “Just keeping the answers honest,” Pranav says, “grounded in real methodology, not shortcuts. That's the thing we don't want to compromise on as we grow.” It's a modest ambition for a platform built on the idea of pausing before you move — and possibly the only one that ever really mattered.
Retrograde is available now on web, iPhone, and Android at www.retrograde.co.in
Contact Info:
Name: Anand V
Email: Send Email
Organization: Jothishi Online and Advertising Services Private Limited
Address: 984 12 A main Indiranagar
Website: https://www.retrograde.co.in
Release ID: 89198249
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