For many, earning millions of dollars is a dream, often a distant one. For others, it is a reality that can come true overnight. Siddharth Saxena is in the latter camp.
Hailing from India’s hinterland, Saxena has gone on to build a multi-million dollar company, Merlin, in the United States. Speaking to content creator Viraj Ala, he offered an astonishing response to the question of how much he made in a year, by instead pivoting to reveal the most he had in a single day. It was a staggering $8 million.
The story behind the millions
Merlin AI was born from a simple yet powerful insight: users were tired of context-switching between multiple AI platforms and their actual work. Saxena and his co-founders, old friends from IIT Kanpur, recognised that the real productivity gap lay not in AI’s capability but in its accessibility. They asked themselves a critical question: what if users could access advanced AI directly within their browser, without abandoning their workflow?
The solution they built was elegant. Merlin is a Chrome extension that integrates multiple language models, including ChatGPT, Claude, Llama 2, Mistral, and Deepseek, into a single, unified interface. Instead of visiting separate websites for different AI tools, users now get real-time AI assistance while browsing. Whether summarising YouTube videos, generating social media content, composing professional emails, or researching complex topics, everything happens in the same tab where users already work.
The rest, as they say, is history. Merlin AI raised $8.36 million in funding across two rounds in 2023, bringing the total capital the company secured to approximately $8 million within a remarkably short window.
The rapid ascent
What makes Saxena’s achievement remarkable is the speed at which Merlin gained traction. Within a year of launch, the platform attracted over one million users across more than 200 countries.
This explosive growth caught the attention of serious investors. Better Capital India, a venture firm focused on early-stage technology companies, backed the startup alongside angel investors including Dharmesh Shah, the co-founder of HubSpot. Google for Startups also recognised the potential and joined as a backer.
The founders also benefited from participation in the Y Combinator accelerator program, a credential that opened doors with both mentors and investors. However, raising capital in the AI tools space is notoriously competitive. The fact that Merlin closed approximately 8 million dollars in a single funding window in 2023 suggests the investors believed in something deeper than just another AI tool. They saw a team that understood the market, founders who had been building in Silicon Valley and had real operational experience, and a product that was already proving product-market fit through its rapid user growth.
Saxena’s background made this possible. Before launching Merlin, he worked at Jumio, where he led deep learning models for ID verification at scale. He worked at Wadhwani AI. His expertise in machine learning, combined with his co-founders’ engineering acumen, gave Merlin credibility that many AI startups lack.
Today, Merlin AI serves millions of users globally and continues to expand its capabilities. For Saxena, the eight million dollar moment was a validation that the problem he identified was real, and the solution he built was worth building for the world.
