Meet the 26-year-old Theethira Vineeth Devaiah, who has developed a company from scratch. He is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of TeliportMe, Bangalore, which lets one explore places through the images and panoramas taken by users through the Android app 360. His system facilitates crowd-sourced panoramic images to build a community.

TeliportMe’s most-sought-after app 360 allows a person to press a button on the camera and take a circular shot of the world around, generate a panoramic, full-circle, hi-resolution picture of the surroundings and share it on Facebook or Twitter as well as TeliportMe’s website.

TeliportMe has outrun other leading apps like Photaf, Occipital, Dermandar and Photosynth and is now the choice for Android users. According to Vineeth Devaiah, the app’s fan base is growing rapidly by 2,000 new users a day with 8,00,000 users already logged in.

Vineeth Devaiah created his first website when he was just 10. He exited his first successful startup at 15, and has been involved in various technological and non-technological startups as a consultant. He graduated from Cornell University and headed the US and International Business Development at Terracycle Inc. which was called The Coolest Little Start-Up in America by Inc. Magazine.

Vineeth was mentored by Bala Manian, a US-based serial entrepreneur in optics space, whose inventions were picked up by George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic to make the film Return of the Jedi, which bagged an Oscar for technical advances.

Other investors in TeliportMe include venture capitalists from America millionaire Dave McClure (Chairman of 500 Start-ups), Bill Gross (Idealab), Alessandro Piol (Vedanta Capital), etc.

Hailing from Thyla village in Kutta, South Kodagu, Vineeth is the only child of Subramani and Latha. His father, a law graduate, worked with HAL for some time and was posted as the Deputy Financial Advisor in Port Trust, Goa. His mother is the daughter of Ammanichanda Appachu.

It was in Goa that Vineeth took the first steps towards starting his business ventures. He studied in Naval Public School there. Vineeth once stumbled upon the National Centre for Antarctica and Ocean Research just around the corner and soon started bugging them for data. Scientists were mystified, but were encouraging. They gave him access to weather patterns for the past 50 years on floppy discs and Vineeth began reverse-engineering a programme that could work with the data. An entrepreneur was born.

He ended up coding a programme that predicted weather patterns fairly accurately, attracting the attention of Infosys, which paid $1 million for it, eventually putting Rs. 65 lakh in his pocket. Vineeth did his undergraduate degree in engineering at REC, Surathkal in Mangalore, completed a Master’s in Bio-medical Engineering at Cornell University in the US, got admission for a Ph.D programme at Harvard but decided not to pursue it. While working at waste-to-products firm Terracycle, he met an old friend and entrepreneur Abhinav Asthana, whose technology inspired the duo to dream up TeliportMe.