Khoj — Why I'm building this

When I was 15, I entered a Photoshop contest at school. I was the bullied, overweight kid — and that contest was the first thing I was ever good at. The first thing that earned me a little respect. I had no idea it was pointing at a career.

Years later, in engineering college during COVID, my club asked me to make some posters — only because I happened to know Photoshop. That turned into a two-year contract running the entire college's marketing. My first real income, from a thing I actually loved. It became my studio, GraphFix, and eventually international clients.

Somewhere in there I realized I loved marketing, psychology, building businesses — a whole world nobody had ever told me was a job.

Receiving the Entrepreneur of the Year award

Entrepreneur of the Year, after my first year building GraphFix.

Had someone shown me at 14 that this was a real, well-paid path — I'd have started years ahead.

Instead I trained as an IT engineer, because those were the paths I could see. That's the gap. Not talent, not effort — visibility.

— And then something I didn't expect

People asked me to teach them. Through the Professionals Solidarity Forum in Hyderabad — an NGO I designed for — I ran two batches: 30 to 40 students, from every walk of life. Someone sixty-plus sitting in the same room as a teenager. A few started landing their own clients before the course even ended.

Two of my students were disabled and joined from home — they wanted a skill they could earn from without leaving the house, without being a burden to anyone.

Teaching a graphic design class at the whiteboard

A student aged sixty-plus receiving his certificate

Teaching graphic design at the Professionals Solidarity Forum — my sixty-plus student, with his certificate.

Finding your path doesn't just change your life. You can hand it to someone else — and change theirs.

There's an anime about a teacher who refused to give up on anyone.

In Assassination Classroom, there's a teacher — Koro-sensei — who takes the students everyone else wrote off: the bottom class, the kids labelled hopeless. And instead of pushing them all down one path, he learns what each of them is individually good at, and builds a way forward for every single one. Not the class. Each kid.

It stuck with me more than any show should. Because that's exactly the teacher I needed at 15, and didn't have. Someone who could look at a bullied kid messing around in Photoshop and say — that's a career, here's the road.

The problem is simple and brutal: there aren't enough teachers like that, and there never will be. You can't give every teenager on earth a mentor who sees their specific spark and knows the exact path from it. There isn't enough time, or enough people, in the world.

So I'm building the closest thing we can build at scale — an AI that tries to see the spark in every kid, and hand them the map.

Khoj will never replace a real Koro-sensei. No AI should. But most kids never get one at all — and to them, a tool that starts from their curiosity and shows them the real road is infinitely more than the nothing they have now.

That's the whole reason this exists. It's the teacher I wish I'd had, built by someone who lived the exact problem it solves.

Abdulrahman Bin Salam Founder, Khoj

I found the work I loved by accident. It should not have been luck.

There's an anime about a teacher who refused to give up on anyone.

The promises we won't break

We never sell your data

No paid placements, ever

Every fact is sourced and dated

A map, never a decision-maker

Come see where your curiosity leads.