Why a Dairy Brand Needs a CTO: Aryan Sharma on Building PYAAS With Kushagra Kaushik

People are surprised when they hear that PYAAS, a dairy brand, has a CTO. Milk is one of the oldest foods there is. Why would selling it need a co-founder whose whole job is technology? I get the question often, and my honest answer is that we did not build PYAAS as a dairy company that happens to use some software. We built it as a technology company that happens to sell milk and ghee.

I am Aryan Sharma, Founder and CEO of PYAAS. I spend my days on the field side: the farms in Gonda, the collection, the quality checks, and the relationships with the farmers who actually make our product. My co-founder, Kushagra Shekhar Kaushik, is our CTO. He owns the part you cannot see in a glass of milk, and it turns out that part decides whether you can trust the glass at all.

Why a dairy brand needs technology

Here is the problem we started with. Indian dairy runs on trust, and most of that trust is unearned. Milk gets pooled from thousands of anonymous farms, blended, and stamped with words like pure and farm fresh that no buyer can check. The whole system asks you to believe a label. When I looked closely, I realised the real question a customer has is not is this milk good. It is how would I ever know. That is not a farming problem. It is an information problem, and information problems are solved with technology.

So when people ask why a dairy brand needs technology, my answer is simple. Honesty at scale is a data problem. If we want every customer to see where their milk came from, who milked the cow, and what that specific batch was checked for, then someone has to capture that data cleanly at the farm and carry it, unbroken, all the way to the pack in your kitchen. That is what Kushagra builds.

What our CTO actually builds

Kushagra Shekhar Kaushik leads product, brand and the traceability technology at PYAAS. In plain terms, he built the system that turns a physical batch of milk into a record you can open on your phone.

• The QR to batch record system that links every pack to its farm, its farmer and that batch's quality record.
• The data pipeline that captures each batch's checks at the source, so nothing is entered from memory or edited after the fact.
• The PYAAS app and website, so scanning a code feels like reading a short story about your milk rather than opening a spreadsheet.

None of this is technology for its own sake. Every piece exists to make one promise keepable: that what we say about a pack can be checked by the person holding it. Marketing can claim anything. A record that was written at the farm, before anyone knew who would buy that pack, is much harder to argue with.

The QR code is the honest part of the pack

The tagline of PYAAS is Know Your Milk, and the QR code is where those three words stop being a slogan. Scan the code on a pack and you can see the exact farm it came from, one of our named partner farms in Gonda, Uttar Pradesh, such as Sri Radha Mohan Dairy Farm and its herd of 76 Holstein Friesian and Sahiwal cows. You see the farmer. You see that batch's quality record.

I could stand in front of you and promise all of that, and you would be right not to fully believe me. A founder's word is worth very little on its own. The technology is what stands behind it. It is the difference between telling you to trust us and simply handing you the evidence and stepping back. You can see how the whole thing fits together on our Know Your Milk page.

Two founders, two halves of one promise

People sometimes assume the field side and the tech side pull against each other, that one of us wants romance and the other wants dashboards. It is the opposite. I cannot make an honest claim about a farm unless Kushagra's system can prove it. He cannot build a meaningful record unless I have earned the farmers' trust to capture real data at the source. The farm and the software are two halves of one promise.

That is why PYAAS has a CTO as a co-founder and not as a hire we would get around to later. If traceability is the product, and I believe it is as much a part of the product as the milk itself, then the person building it has to be in the room when the company's values are decided, not handed a specification afterwards.

What we are building toward

Today this system already ships with our A2 Bilona cow ghee, which we send across India. Our fresh A2 cow milk launches in Lucknow from August 2026 and will expand across Uttar Pradesh from there, and the same traceability will travel with every pack from the first day.

We are building toward a ₹100 crore dairy brand, but the number is not the point, and it is not here yet. The point is a version of Indian dairy where trust is earned with evidence instead of adjectives. That, in one line, is why PYAAS needs a CTO. Not to make milk more complicated, but to make honesty something you can hold in your hand and check for yourself. If you want to know how the two of us think about all this, read more about PYAAS.