How Truein turned faded fingerprints into a $40K/month face recognition attendance business

Who built it, and what they built

Ankit Tanna is the founder of Truein, a Pune-based company selling attendance software built on face recognition. The product targets organisations that manage contractual and distributed staff, aiming to make attendance tracking more transparent and to lift workforce productivity. The company reports $40,000 in monthly recurring revenue.

Before starting up, Ankit spent more than a decade working at large software companies across India, Singapore, and the USA, and describes himself as a product engineer with an entrepreneurial streak.

Where the idea came from

Truein is Ankit's second venture. His first was a ride-sharing startup, which the team wound down after running into unclear regulations in India at the time. They sold it to a large Indian automobile company — a modest exit, but one that left him with cash to fund what came next.

While visiting enterprise customers and meeting admin and HR leaders, he kept hearing about attendance problems for contract and remotely deployed workers. Staff rotated frequently, some workers reported directly to sites, and keeping onboarding and attendance records aligned across locations was slow and error-prone.

The incumbent systems relied on fingerprint biometrics, but many workers had faded fingerprints, so attendance fell back to manual entry. The tools also offered little control or transparency over attendance policies and a poor employee experience. Ankit judged the problem to be global and began building a solution around AI and face recognition.