Velona already lets Indian developers reach 300 plus AI models for ten rupees. Its next move is deployment, with free hosting for static apps and UPI billing for everything else.
VELONA.IN · BUILT IN INDIA
Most Indian software stories start in a Bengaluru office. This one starts in a locomotive factory.
For more than thirty years, the man who went on to co-found Velona worked at Chittaranjan Locomotive Works, one of India's largest locomotive manufacturing facilities. His career was mechanical engineering in its most physical form: production, quality improvement, maintenance, and running teams that had to get real machines out of a real gate.
Then he retired. And instead of picking up gardening, Tapan Maji picked up artificial intelligence.
"I did not come from a software background," he says on Velona's founder page. "I simply believed that learning never stops."
Retirement as a classroom
Retirement gave him the one thing three decades of factory schedules never did, which was time. He spent it reading documentation, testing large language models, poking at prompt engineering, and generally doing what a curious engineer does when handed a new machine. Take it apart. See what it is actually made of.
What he found, alongside the small team of engineers now building Velona with him, was not a technology problem. It was an access problem.
Powerful AI models existed. Getting to them from India did not. Most platforms wanted an international credit card. Many wanted a monthly subscription before you had written a single line of code. Some wanted a large upfront payment that no second year engineering student in a tier two city was ever going to justify to a parent.
"The real barrier was never creativity or talent. It was accessibility."
So the team built the platform they wished had existed.
What Velona does today
Velona is an INR native AI gateway. One API key gives access to more than 300 models, including GPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama, Mistral and DeepSeek, through a single OpenAI compatible endpoint. You top up a wallet using UPI, RuPay, a domestic debit card or net banking. The minimum top up is ten rupees.
There is no subscription, no seat fee and no minimum monthly spend. Billing is per token, and every usage row shows the working: model cost in dollars, the live forex rate, a flat platform fee, a small forex buffer, and then the rupee figure you actually pay. Developers get real time cost tracking per key and spend limits per key, which is a polite way of saying an infinite loop at two in the morning cannot quietly empty your wallet.
The name, incidentally, comes from sailing. Wind, sails, navigation, the idea of setting out into an ocean nobody has fully mapped yet. It is a slightly romantic name for what is fundamentally a billing and routing layer, but anyone who has watched the AI industry over the last three years will admit the ocean metaphor is not wrong.
The half of the story an API key cannot finish
Here is the gap the team kept running into.
Give a student an API key and she will build something good. Now she has a folder on a laptop and no way to show it to another human being. You cannot put a folder on a resume. You cannot send localhost to a recruiter, a client, a professor or your mother. A project only becomes real the moment it has a link somebody else can open.
Cloud hosting was supposed to solve this. In practice it reintroduced the exact wall Velona was built to remove: a card form, a currency the user does not earn in, and a pricing page with eleven variables in it.
Which is why Velona's next product is deployment.
Deploy Velona, in plain language
Static apps will be free. Not free for fourteen days. Free. Portfolios, college projects, landing pages, documentation sites, React or Vue or plain HTML builds. Upload it, get a live address, walk away. No card on file and no trial clock counting down in the background.
Dynamic apps will cost very little. Real backends with routes, forms and running processes are priced in tens of rupees a month rather than thousands, with a cheaper annual option, billed over UPI in rupees with a proper GST invoice.
No configuration file archaeology. No evening lost to reading about ingress controllers. No cold start pricing calculator. No bill arriving at month end in dollars with a number that makes you sit down. Custom domain support is on the roadmap, so a college project that turns into a real product can quietly grow into its own name.
Put the two halves together and the workflow closes: build with Velona's AI models, ship on Velona's hosting, and pay for both from the same UPI app you use to buy chai.
What it honestly is not
A note of realism, because overselling infrastructure is the fastest way to lose developers permanently.
This is not a hyperscaler and is not pretending to be one. There is no global edge network across thirty regions, no managed database fleet, no marketplace of four hundred adjacent services nobody uses. The first version does one job. Take your app, run it, give it a stable address, keep it up, and charge you very little.
If you are running core banking, use a bank sized cloud. If you are a student, an indie builder, a freelancer keeping six client demos alive, or a small firm with an internal tool that eleven people depend on, this is aimed squarely at you. The big clouds were never really designed for that user. They simply had no competition.
Why any of this matters
India does not have a shortage of people who can build things. It has a shortage of frictionless on ramps. Every rupee of unnecessary cost and every foreign card requirement quietly filters out the exact people who would benefit most from getting their hands on this technology early.
There is something fitting about that problem being taken on by someone who spent thirty years making sure heavy machines actually left the factory. Locomotives do not care about hype cycles. They either move or they do not.
"I spent more than thirty years building locomotives. Today I am helping people build with artificial intelligence."
Ten rupees gets an Indian developer every major AI model. Zero rupees, soon, will get their app a public URL. Whatever gets built next, at least the payment page will not be the thing that stops it.
Velona is an INR native AI API gateway built in India. Explore the platform at velona.in, read the founder story at velona.in/founder, or try the free tools at velona.in/free-tools. Deployment features described here are in development and pricing is indicative at the time of writing.