Rhea Karuturi

Rhea Karuturi

Bangalore · San Francisco

B.S. in STS, Stanford 2025

I care deeply about trust: I like to learn, build companies, write books, and teach others. I co-founded Hoovu Fresh, a B2B puja flower supply chain across nine Indian cities, where I'm the CTO. My first novel, LIGHGHT, is out querying. I keep a reading list that began in 6th grade and has, somehow, reached 624 books.

I'm interested in trust infrastructures, systems thinking, innovation in India, working with great people, and using technology to give myself more time to be bored — that's when the best ideas happen. I have a bias towards building, and I love writing, teaching, reading and learning.

The throughline

If there's a single thread running through everything I've done, it's trust. My Stanford honors thesis was on trust infrastructures — Aadhaar, India's biometric ID system — and how the same architecture becomes transparency or surveillance depending on who gets to see whom. That question, who sees and who is seen, has followed me into every project since.

At Hoovu we built a retail category that didn't exist before us, which meant earning trust before we could build anything else — with farmers, with temples, with customers buying flowers sight-unseen. On Shark Tank India in 2020, the one thing I said I'd never gamble on was the trust of our customers. I still think it's the only real moat.

Now I think about trust's speed. Deployment happens at the speed of trust, and the highest-leverage work in AI right now isn't at the frontier but in the even distribution of what already works. It's why I teach it, and why the tools I build refuse to fake it — Throughline gives an honest read or an honest stop; ComPrice shows its sources and never pretends the data is more than it is. Trust is earned as much by what you won't claim as by what you will.

Explore my second brain:

Hoovu Fresh

Hoovu is a tech-enabled supply chain for puja flowers — the garlands and loose blooms used in temples, weddings, and homes across India. We operate in nine cities and run at roughly ₹20 crore in revenue. My sister Yeshoda is the CEO. We were on Shark Tank India in Season 2.

I run engineering and strategy. Most of my work right now is building the internal AI layer that turns six years of operational knowledge into something the team can actually use.

Read how it's built: the dashboard · building AI agents

hoovufresh.com · press & talks →

Building

Small, complete apps I designed and built end to end — most with React, Firebase, and Claude. Each has a write-up: how it was made, the design thinking, the code, and a prompt to build your own.

All projects & experiments →

Writing

LIGHGHT

Debut novel · 56,000 words · experimental literary fiction

Out querying. A short, strange book about attention and grief. I'll link to it here when it has a home.

The Rose King

In progress

My second novel. About ambition and the cost we pay for it.

Substack

Essays, mostly on books and building.

Reading life

I've kept a list of every book I've finished since I was eleven. It's at 624 and counting. I also host a small book club on YouTube.

Earlier bylines

Times of India, Deccan Herald, and the Stanford Daily, where opinion writing won me the William Woo Award. Selected pieces →

Background

I studied Science, Technology and Society at Stanford. My honors thesis was on Aadhaar (presentation) — trust infrastructure as a lens has stayed with me. Before Hoovu I wrote for newspapers, taught introductory CS, and spent time in art museums and craft villages trying to understand how things get made.

I split my time between Bangalore and San Francisco. I read mostly fiction and philosophy.

The Million Page Project

Every book I've finished, since 6th grade.