The Data Game

Pitting your company against an international propaganda machine may not look like a solid business strategy, but then Pulkit Jaiswal has never taken the easiest route

- Chris Wright

WHEN FORBES MAGAZINE put Pulkit Jaiswal on its 30 Under 30 list for 2022, the accompanying blurb described him as a “serial entrepreneur,” a term that calls to mind a rather pat list of attributes: restlessness, audacity, intellectual promiscuity. Having recently turned 30, the New York-based tech pioneer is indeed all of these things (“I built drones in high school,” he says in true Silicon Valley style), but he has also shown a tendency to go off-piste from time to time.

Jaiswal first rose to prominence in his early 20s, when the success of his autonomous drone start-up, SwarmX, earned him a spot on the MIT Technology Review’s 2016 Innovators Under 35 list. Shortly afterward, as he puts it, “I took a break from starting things to look inward,” which he did while trekking across the former Soviet Union, with a stopover at the infamous Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.