Work & Research
Work & Research
An enterprise SaaS platform for AI voice agents live across three regions, an enterprise SaaS company serving 160+ enterprise customers and 290M+ end-users, a consumer voice product with 14 million+ downloads, and an independent research project on self-evolving AI agents. Here's what Vikas Goel is working on, and what he's built.
2026 — present
Independent research
ThinkerWave
ThinkerWave is an independent AI research project Vikas Goel started in 2026, investigating self-evolving agent systems. The first published work, Die to Evolve: When AI Agents Mutate Both What They Are and What They Seek, introduces a system where both the agent's identity (persona, strategy, reasoning approach) and its evaluation criteria evolve generationally, while accumulated knowledge — failures, heuristics, best prior outputs — persists across complete identity replacement.
The core insight: most self-improving AI systems can rewrite their own code, distill strategies from experience, and self-debug across iterations. But what they can't do is evolve their own definition of what success means. The ThinkerWave research addresses this evaluation gap through dual-space optimisation — searching the space of possible solutions and the space of possible evaluation frameworks simultaneously.
The work has been validated across five unrelated domains — pharmaceutical drug design, financial analysis, scientific reasoning, planning, and expert-knowledge tasks — using identical generic seed criteria with no domain-specific configuration. Patent application 202611044024 was filed at the Indian Patent Office in April 2026.
- Independent research project, started 2026
- Patent pending — self-evolving evaluation criteria mechanism
- Validated across pharma, finance, science, planning, and reasoning domains
- Built on the Claude family of frontier models
Oct 2025 — present
CTO
Nexiva — Enterprise SaaS for AI Voice Agents
Vikas Goel led Nexiva from concept to global launch in under 12 months, then took the CTO role formally in October 2025. Nexiva is an enterprise SaaS platform delivering autonomous, human-like AI voice agents to large customers — replacing the long integration cycles and fragmented tooling that traditional contact-centre platforms force on enterprises.
Outcomes delivered: Concept in early 2025 → public debut at MWC Barcelona 2025 (Booth 6F-82) → live in three regions (India, MENA, LATAM) with enterprise customers across telecom, BFSI, and other industries handling inbound service, outbound sales, and collections workflows. All inside a single year.
The deep enterprise-platform expertise built at blackNgreen over a decade laid the foundation. Voice AI at enterprise scale is unforgiving: latency must stay inside conversational thresholds, language switching needs to feel native, and a single hallucination is a customer-impact event, not a chat-window inconvenience. The Nexiva architecture is designed around those constraints from the ground up — with the multi-tenancy, observability, and predictable SLAs that enterprise SaaS buyers actually require.
- Enterprise SaaS platform for AI voice agents
- Launched at MWC Barcelona 2025
- Live across India, Middle East, and Latin America
- Inbound service, outbound sales, and collections workflows
- Multi-tenant, multi-language, enterprise-grade reliability
2017 — present
CTO leadership
MagicCall — Voice Changer App
Long before Nexiva's AI voice agents went into production, the team at blackNgreen — under Vikas Goel's CTO leadership — shipped MagicCall, a real-time voice changer for phone calls. Released in 2017, the app transforms a user's voice mid-call into a male, female, child, or cartoon character, layered over live background sound effects (traffic, music, ambient).
The numbers tell the story:
- 14 million+ downloads on Google Play (1.4 crore+) — Android alone, with additional iOS distribution on the App Store
- Live globally, with India as the launch and primary growth market
- One of the most-downloaded India-built voice apps on the Play Store
MagicCall matters beyond the numbers. It's where blackNgreen built the engineering competence that Nexiva is now built on: real-time voice processing at consumer scale. Speech in, transformed speech out, sub-second latency, running over a real phone call, at carrier-grade reliability — that's the same engineering shape as a modern AI voice agent. The decade between MagicCall (2017) and Nexiva (2025) is the decade Vikas Goel and the blackNgreen team spent learning, one production lesson at a time, what it actually takes to put voice AI in front of millions of users.
Read the full retrospective: Sixteen million users in five days — the actual story on LinkedIn (May 2026). The founder's account of what really happened in those first five days — the infrastructure crisis, the retention numbers behind the headline, the product pivot mid-flight, and the engineering disciplines that made the difference between surviving the spike and being killed by it.
2013 — present
Chief Technology Officer
blackNgreen — Enterprise SaaS Company
Vikas Goel has been CTO at blackNgreen since 2013, growing it from 5 enterprise customers to 160+ and scaling annual revenue past $20M ARR. blackNgreen today is a global enterprise SaaS company with a multi-product portfolio: the OXM (Omnichannel Experience Management) platform, the EVA AI customer-care platform, the Nexiva AI voice agents platform, and the MagicCall consumer voice product. Across these, the platform reaches 290 million end-users across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South America.
The leadership scope spans engineering teams of 50+ direct reports across India (Gurgaon, Chennai), Dubai, and parts of Africa — assembled, structured, and developed over the past decade. Hiring at scale, building review and on-call cultures, navigating cross-timezone and cross-cultural team dynamics, and setting technical direction that survives generational platform shifts is most of the actual work.
Enterprise customers include: Orange, MTN, Africell, Micoope, Forza Delivery, and others across telecom, BFSI, and adjacent industries.
“We built EVA from the ground up to address the complex needs of enterprises, harnessing AI to deliver smarter and more effective solutions. It's about enabling them to reimagine their future with limitless potential.”
— Vikas Goel, quoted in Business Insider Africa, December 2024 — feature on the EVA AI platform delivering 40% reduction in customer-care costs and 94% CSAT for enterprise customers.
The OXM platform was the foundation that made EVA and Nexiva possible. Multi-tenant architecture, enterprise-grade reliability, multi-region deployment, and hundreds of millions of daily end-user interactions create a uniquely demanding engineering environment — and a uniquely well-instrumented one. The disciplines required to ship enterprise SaaS at this scale (predictable SLAs, audit trails, API-first design, graceful degradation) are exactly what AI voice agents demand on top.
- $20M+ ARR — built from a single-product startup
- 5 → 160+ enterprise customers over 13 years
- 290M+ end-users reached
- Multi-product portfolio: OXM, EVA, Nexiva, MagicCall
- Deployments across Asia, MENA, Africa, and South America
- Engineering organisation: 50+ engineers across India, Middle East, and Africa
- 13+ years leading the platform through three generational shifts (VAS → OXM → AI)
1996 — 2013
Earlier work
Building the telecom backbone
Before blackNgreen, Vikas spent 17 years across CMC Ltd, HCL/LexisNexis, Hughes Software Systems, Aricent, and VNL (Vihaan Networks), working on signalling, switching, and rural GSM infrastructure. This is the unglamorous but foundational work that the modern internet and mobile experience are built on top of — and the source of most of his instincts about reliability, observability, and graceful degradation.
- VNL — Software Architect, rural GSM systems
- Aricent — Telecom signalling and switching infrastructure
- Hughes Software Systems — Production communications software
- HCL / LexisNexis — Software engineering
- CMC Ltd — First role, software developer (1996)
Read more
More on the thinking behind these ventures in the blog, or the full career story.