About
India's studios run on external drives. They deserve better.
Driveless is a Bengaluru company building the streaming drive for India's post houses, VFX studios, agencies and production houses.
Why now
India's animation, VFX and post-production industry is worth about ₹105 billion a year and growing, with more than 500 studios in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai and Bengaluru. Most still move footage on drives couriered across the city, share cuts through links that expire, and edit behind office links that ten people share.
Two things changed. Symmetric gigabit fibre now costs ₹2,499 a month, and object storage costs a few hundred rupees per terabyte. A drive that streams from the cloud stopped being a research project and became something a small studio can afford.
Streaming filesystems exist elsewhere in the world, built for studios in other markets. None of them invoice in rupees, put a cache appliance in a shared office, or send someone to migrate the NAS you already own. That's the company we're building.
What we believe
Reliability is the product. A studio that loses a client's footage never comes back. We build on proven storage engines, version every write, and publish a status page from day one.
Local beats remote. A vendor you can call on WhatsApp at 11 pm before a delivery is worth more than a feature.
Honest numbers. We publish what streams on what line, and what needs a cache. Nobody should discover bandwidth limits during a client review.
Team
Small on purpose. Two of these seats are open.
Ayyan
Ten years on the demand side of the internet — audience building, performance marketing across Meta and Google, and D2C ecommerce in India and the US. Runs One Hatch Media. Leads product, studios and partnerships.
Technical co-founder
You've shipped storage or filesystem code in production and want to own the engine, the cache tiers and the client apps. Meaningful equity. Bengaluru preferred.
Write to usFounding engineer, clients
You care about first-run experience, menu-bar apps and drives that never surprise an editor. You'll ship the Mac client, and only the Mac client.
Write to usPress and partnerships
Resellers who sell NAS and grading gear to studios, training institutes, and journalists covering India's media industry: we'd like to hear from you.