Nikhil Gandhi Launches VYYB AI Technologies In Dubai
Nikhil Gandhi has launched VYYB AI Technologies Ltd, moving from running media businesses to building one of his own.
- Company: VYYB AI Technologies Ltd
- Headquarters: the DIFC Dubai AI Campus
- First market: the UAE
- First focus: commercial background music
- Previously: TikTok, MX Player, The Walt Disney Company and Times Network
What The Nikhil Gandhi Venture Is Attacking
An inconsistency rather than a gap. Businesses spend heavily on the design and visual identity of a space, and then manage the music, the temperature and the scent in it separately, by different people, with no shared idea of what the room is supposed to feel like.
Starting with music is the sensible entry point, because it is the sensory element with the clearest existing spend and the weakest existing logic. Most commercial playlists are chosen once and left.
The Background That Explains The Choice
Twenty-six years of senior roles across digital platforms and media businesses, covering user growth, monetisation, advertising, distribution and commercial strategy. That is an operator's record rather than a technologist's, and it exposed Gandhi to several business models and to how consumer behaviour shifts around them.
The technical half is more recent: Gandhi completed MIT's Applied Agentic AI programme in 2026. The combination of a media operator's instincts and fresh grounding in agentic systems is unusual among founders in this space, most of whom have one or the other.
Why Physical Spaces Are The Harder Market
A software product sold into retail, hospitality or fitness has to survive a procurement cycle, prove itself against a manager's own judgement, and work without anybody paying attention to it. None of those is a problem a media platform prepares you for.
What does carry across is the monetisation question, which in this category is whether sensory management is a licence per site or a service per brand. That decision, more than the AI, will determine whether VYYB is a tool or a business.
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