I'm Deepankar Varma - most people call me Deep. I founded WAYO in June 2025 to fix something that had annoyed me on every trip I'd ever taken: planning one costs you forty browser tabs, and the plan falls apart the moment it rains.
I came to it from the data side. I studied Computer Science at Thapar Institute, spent a year at HSBC building large-scale data pipelines on Apache Spark, and I'm now doing a Master of Business Analytics at Deakin University in Melbourne.
The story
Why I built WAYO
- 01
The realisation at HSBC
I spent a year at HSBC writing distributed data workflows - Spark, MapReduce, migrating legacy Java pipelines to PySpark. I got good at making data move quickly. What I kept noticing was that speed wasn't the bottleneck. Organisations rarely lack data; they lose value somewhere between having it and acting on it. Writing efficient code is worth something, but understanding what the data means for the person on the other end is what actually changes an outcome.
- 02
Why travel
That gap is nowhere more obvious than trip planning. Every recommendation engine has the data - weather, transit, opening hours, crowds, reviews. Almost none of it reaches you as a decision. You get a list, and you do the synthesis yourself, on your phone, in a queue, in the rain.
- 03
What WAYO does differently
WAYO builds the day rather than the list. You approve each slot as it's proposed, so the plan learns your taste instead of guessing it. SmartPulse watches weather and transit and reshuffles the day before it breaks. Every suggestion is checked by someone who actually lives there. It's the same conviction I came away from HSBC with, pointed at a problem I care about: data is only worth what it changes.
Background
Where I've worked and studied
- 2025 - present
Founder · WAYO
Melbourne, VIC
- 2025 - 2027
Master of Business Analytics · Deakin University
Melbourne, VIC
- 2024 - 2025
Software Engineer · HSBC
Apache Spark, PySpark, distributed data pipelines
- 2024
Research Intern · IIT Delhi
Machine learning security and model stealing
- 2023
Summer Research Intern · IIIT Delhi
Deep learning for ECG signal classification
- 2020 - 2024
B.Tech, Computer Science · Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology
Patiala, India
Research
Published work
Machine learning security research from my time at IIT Delhi.
- Assessing Risk of Stealing Proprietary Models for Medical Imaging Tasks
- Examining the Threat Landscape: Foundation Models and Model Stealing
Press and partnership enquiries go through the press page, or just get in touch.
See what we built
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