Why I Built NEXA
Zubin Pahuja · February 20, 2026
You have 500+ connections. Yet, you are completely alone.
LinkedIn sold you a network.
What you got was an audience.
500 people who won't pick up.
A thousand connections you'd never call.
A feed engineered for engagement, not relationships.
Your data sold. Your attention harvested.
$40 a month to perform networking
for an algorithm that doesn't care if you ever find anyone.
I worked at Dropbox. Uber. Microsoft. Citadel.
Every job that mattered came the same way.
One person. One phone call. One sentence:
“You should meet this person.”
Not once from LinkedIn.
Not once from a cold email.
Always a warm introduction.
Always trust, transferred person to person.
We've always known how this works.
And then we built LinkedIn anyway.
I spent a decade building AI.
I watched voice AI stop sounding like a robot
and start sounding like a person.
And I kept asking one question:
What if technology finally did what it promised?
Not more messages. One real conversation.
That's NEXA.
Ten minutes. One conversation.
NEXA listens - not to keywords, but to you.
Your values. What you're building. Who you work best with.
Everything a resume throws away.
Everything that determines real fit.
That conversation becomes a knowledge graph -
your skills, goals, values, context.
Not a profile. A person.
Your profile is private.
No recruiters crawling it.
No algorithm judging it.
Authentic, not performative.
Then NEXA goes to work.
We trace the warm path through people who actually trust you.
We will never sell this data.
We use it for one thing: to find your person.
When we make the introduction, both sides wanted it.
Nobody ghosts. Because nobody was cold.
LinkedIn gives you a haystack.
NEXA finds the needle.
NEXA is for anyone who needs the right person.
Finding a cofounder.
Meeting the investor who funds your space.
Landing the role you actually want.
Hiring someone great through someone you trust.
Finding your first customer.
Getting a mentor who's been where you're going.
Whatever you need, it lives in your network.
Most people never reach it.
NEXA does.
We're living through a loneliness epidemic.
Documented. Measured. Alarming.
And ironically, AI is making it worse -
people are turning to AI companions to fill the gap.
For the first time in history, technology is substituting
for human connection instead of enabling it.
NEXA is an AI built to do the opposite.
Not to replace human connection.
To create the conditions for it.
The loneliness epidemic doesn't need a chatbot.
It needs a matchmaker.
Nobody gets to the end of their life wishing
they'd sent more cold emails.
They wish they'd met more of the right people.
If you're tired of the noise, I built this for you.
One conversation. That's all it takes.
Zubin Pahuja
Founder, NEXA
One ask: share this with one person you trust.
Not because it helps us grow - though it does.
Because every person who joins makes your matches better.
This thing gets better together.
P.S. We chose .community deliberately.
This isn't an app. It's a movement.