Indian-Origin Meta Engineer Quits $300,000 Job, Launches AI Startup Mitosis Labs

An Indian-origin software engineer has announced that he has quit his $300,000-a-year job at Meta to launch an artificial intelligence startup focused on building privacy-first AI tools. Prakshal Jain shared the announcement in a LinkedIn post, revealing that he and co-founder Alex Morris are coming out of stealth mode to launch Mitosis Labs after working on the project for seven months.

Mr Jain, who spent nearly a decade building user experiences, said he previously worked as a frontend engineer at Meta, where he helped develop extended reality (XR) and web experiences. He said his team launched Facebook and Instagram on Meta Quest in 2024 and also contributed to updates for Meta's AI applications.

Explaining why he left one of the world's biggest technology companies, Mr Jain said he believes artificial intelligence will fundamentally change the way people interact with computers.

"I caught myself living in my terminal. I stopped going to websites or using apps. I'd just ask ChatGPT or Claude Code to find things or do things for me," he wrote.

This experience led him to coin the phrase, "The best UX is no UI."

According to Mr Jain, traditional screens, dashboards and forms exist because people still want to monitor what computers are doing. He argued that as AI agents become more capable, much of this manual interaction could disappear. However, he stressed that protecting user privacy must remain a top priority.

To test his idea, Mr Jain said he built a personal AI agent using his own digital footprint. He claimed the experiment reduced his iPhone screen time by 78 per cent in just three weeks.

He said the goal of Mitosis Labs is to create AI systems that can handle routine tasks while giving users complete control over their personal data.

Mr Jain outlined what he described as the company's three pillars. The first is an intelligence layer that is reliable, secure, fast and capable of handling large amounts of data. He claimed the system has already achieved state-of-the-art benchmark results.

The second pillar focuses on creating an interface simple enough for anyone to use, including older users who may not be comfortable with complex technology.

The third aims to build a wider AI community beyond Silicon Valley so that more people can confidently adopt the technology.

These ideas have led to three products under development: Mitosis Cortex, Yappy, and UFA & Wikipedia.

"We've been building for seven months. I'm really excited to finally show our hard work to you in the coming days," Mr Jain wrote, while inviting investors, customers and others interested in the project to contact him.

His announcement has drawn attention online as more experienced engineers leave major technology companies to build startups focused on the next wave of AI innovation.