AI-Powered and Founder-Funded: How Yogesh Nagarkar Built UNpkl His Way
Yogesh Nagarkar turned late-night tinkering into UNpkl—a hardware-software cybersecurity startup making network control as simple as typing a sentence. What began as a side project matured into a live Amazon-listed product, prompting Yogesh to pivot boldly from B2B ambitions to a consumer-first strategy. In this Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur Spotlight, he shares how failing forward, leveraging AI for fast-paced development, and funding his own vision gave him freedom to build a tool that demystifies cybersecurity for everyday users. With UNpkl, Yogesh is reshaping how we manage digital trust—one natural language command at a time.
Hi, Yogesh Nagarkar! Thanks for joining us today. Tell us about your business. Who do you serve, how do you serve them, and what's the impact that your business and work makes?
UNpkl develops natural language managed hardware and software cybersecurity products. We currently have a B2C Wi-Fi6 mesh hardware product on Amazon and on our website. Our B2B product to manage multiple Wi-Fi and Wired/Virtual networks will be released soon. UNpkl a live data camera to your network that lets you zoom in to live activity of any device on your network. UNpkl also makes control and policy enforcement very easy via natural language commands like "block social media from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm weekdays". Fine-grained control is also possible via commands like "block Tim's iPhone from Facebook for 2 hours". In highly secure environments that protect sensitive data, we feature "block all except my trusted destinations" as an example to only allow certain destinations.
UNpkl largely democratizes network policy management without having to hire experts to view, analyze and enforce policy. it does so via natural language interface without complex UI controls. This drastically reduces reaction time to block zero-day hacks and implements at its core "if this connection is safe, proceed
Tell us about the moment you finally felt like you went from wantrepreneur to entrepreneur.
When the little homework that I put into my project after work hours, it was more of a linear progress over time composed of a lot of learning tinkering and failing. Finally past getting all ducks in a row around end of 2024, when UNpkl was a viable network product listed on Amazon, that I personally found to work past opening it from a box, I decided that there was a fair chance this could work.
Describe the moment or period in your life/career that motivated you to make the entrepreneurial leap.
The corporate jobs I worked on taught me the status quo and from that it was not hard to imagine how things should be simpler to diminish the learning curve for the end user. To do so with a mixture of existing paradigms, research and my own nuances, it was easy to drive myself to create.
Describe a tool, service, or software that has been a game-changer for your business. How does it contribute to your success?
AI tools like Cursor, Claude have helped a lot! Although they may not be precise, they augment development by writing skeleton code and comments way quicker than one could type and debug oneself - especially client/middleware side. Also these tools learn from the latest codebases and there may be newer features and types in a language that you may not know existed. Hence all in all these are going to drive everything in a typical software stack development environment.
We know that success is very often a non-linear path. Tell us about a failure, pivot point, or lesson that changed your course or direction and helped to get you where you are today.
I only went from one failure in project commits to the next. Still do. When I cleared those failures one at a time with the target picture in mind, I had a viable product. Having a product, I thought initially it would be for B2B and engaged potential leads. Past talking to them it became clear that we were not quite ready based on the common subset of features they would need to see. However it was clear that a B2C product was viable and though brutal, we decided we would make a pivot to B2C to buy time for B2B development.
What unconventional strategy did you employ that significantly impacted your business?
Usually companies look for investors at the very beginning of having an idea. We instead, for better or worse decided to invest in ourselves to come up with a product. This, while sounding expensive, lets you have somewhat more control of how you drive the product.
What’s something you wish you knew sooner that you’d give as advice for aspiring or newer entrepreneurs?
Seek help early - even though you may think you can do it all yourself.
Want to dive deeper into Yogesh Nagarkar's work? Check out the links below!
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