From Weekend Hackathons to Building Alto: The Entrepreneurial Journey of J. Manojkumar

For J. Manojkumar, entrepreneurship didn't begin with a pitch deck or a business plan. It began with an idea discussed after work, weekends spent at hackathons, and a growing restlessness with the edges of a conventional engineering career.

By day, he worked as a Technical Lead in Chennai. By the weekend, he was building. Today, he is the founder of Alto: an AI-powered venture exploring solutions across travel, retail, and intelligent consumer experiences, all while holding down a full-time job.

The journey, he is quick to say, didn't happen overnight.

"I always wanted to explore the business side," Manojkumar says. "There were always ideas in my mind." MBA programs had crossed his radar, largely as a way to understand how businesses are actually built. But the demands of a stable career kept pulling him back.

Then one hackathon changed the calculus.

When Weekend Experiments Started Feeling Bigger

Manojkumar and his colleague Vasudevan had always been tech geeks — a shared instinct that gradually turned a professional relationship into a creative partnership. Outside of work, the two started entering hackathons, initially to challenge themselves, eventually to test something more serious.

"We would brainstorm ideas, discuss implementation approaches, and slowly build solutions," he says. "Every weekend."

The inflection point came through a Google-supported hackathon organised via Hack2Skill. The problem statement centred on retail optimization, specifically, the costly cycle of overstocking and understocking that quietly bleeds resources from retailers on both ends. What started as a technical exercise quickly felt like something worth pursuing beyond the competition.

"At first, we were just trying to solve the problem statement," Manojkumar says. "But when we started getting selected and receiving validation, it gave us confidence that maybe this idea could become something bigger."

That solution became Alto.retail: an AI-driven platform designed to help retailers manage inventory more intelligently. More importantly, it shifted something in how Manojkumar thought about his own future. Entrepreneurship no longer felt abstract. It felt achievable.

A Longstanding Interest in Building

The desire to build, though, had existed long before any hackathon.

Manojkumar points to his family as an early influence — his father runs an agricultural products business, and his brother shares a computer science background. Growing up, the two would talk through ideas at home. That habit of thinking like a builder never really left him.

Even within a corporate career, he found himself drawn to the question of how products move from concept to market. "There are always ideas," he says. "But implementation depends on resources, investment, and validation."

That last word kept coming up. Hackathons had built momentum and technical confidence. But Manojkumar understood that building a real business required something else: a clearer grasp of market fit, execution, and the unglamorous realities of going from prototype to product.

That search led him to the Bower LEAD program.

Moving Beyond Prototypes

Joining LEAD, Manojkumar says, was less about launching overnight and more about learning to think like a founder. Based in Tamil Nadu, he attends sessions online while working full-time through the week. The rhythm is deliberate: weekdays for the job, weekends for classes, and evenings for implementing what he's learning.

"We take notes, complete assignments, and then from Monday to Friday, alongside our jobs, we keep building," he says.

Structured feedback and mentorship began shaping not just Alto.retail, but a broader vision. The venture expanded into Alto — an umbrella for multiple AI-powered products. The strongest to emerge alongside the retail platform was Alto.travel: an AI-powered trip planning tool that generates personalised itineraries, weather-based recommendations, and curated destination insights.

One of the most significant shifts during this phase, Manojkumar says, was learning to think critically about prioritisation. "We started validating different ideas and understanding where demand actually exists," he says. "That helped us think practically about what to build first."

The crowded travel tech market sharpened that thinking further. "There are many platforms already available. The question becomes: what makes your product different?" For Alto.travel, his answer centres on layering human judgment over AI output — making recommendations users can actually trust.

"We want to bring a human intelligence layer along with AI," he highlights.

Balancing a Career While Building a Startup

For now, Manojkumar holds both worlds simultaneously, a reality that is rarely clean or easy.

"Work-life balance becomes extremely important," he says. "When it comes to entrepreneurship, investment, resources, and validation all need to work together."

But despite the uncertainty, he's firm on one thing: the mistake most aspiring founders make is waiting too long to start. His advice is blunt. Validate before you build. Understand whether the market actually needs what you're making and then figure out your direction.

For Manojkumar, the journey didn't begin with certainty. It began with experimentation: through hackathons, late-night conversations, and a willingness to keep building inside the margins of an already full life.

What started as a weekend pursuit is still becoming something larger, one idea and one validation at a time.