Arpit Uniyal on building personalized AI astrology
Arpit Uniyal is the founder of Veadicastro, a platform that uses AI and astrological calculations to provide personalized kundli insights and answers. The conversation looks at why chart-based context matters, how Google search brings most new users, and why the business is watching discovery through AI assistants without chasing every new tool.
Useful AI astrology depends on more than a capable model: Veadicastro combines birth chart calculations with conversation context to make answers more personal. The same focus on usefulness, alongside gradual testing of new discovery channels, is central to its approach to growth.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
I started Veadicastro from a small village in Uttarakhand when I was 17, with an old laptop and no team or funding. I wanted to build something that made Vedic astrology more accessible without giving people the same generic predictions they could find anywhere else. What makes us different is that Vedika uses actual astrological calculations from a person’s chart to answer their questions, rather than just generating random AI responses. I built the product myself, from the technology to the website, and grew it through organic search without spending on marketing. For me, the goal has always been to build something people genuinely find useful, not just another astrology app.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Right now, most of our new users come from Google search. I built Veadicastro without spending on marketing, so organic traffic has been our biggest source of growth. I’m happy that people are finding us on their own, but I don’t want the business to depend only on Google. I want to grow through our Android app, word of mouth, and paid marketing as well, so we can reach more people and build a product they keep coming back to.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
I use AI to handle astrology questions on Veadicastro through Vedika, our AI astrologer. It takes actual birth chart calculations and turns them into answers that are easy to understand. Doing this manually for every user would be almost impossible for me as a solo founder. But one thing I struggled with was getting AI to give answers that felt natural instead of repeating the same things. I realized that simply using a powerful AI model was not enough, so I started working on how it understands astrology data and remembers the context of a conversation. That experience taught me that AI works best when you build the right system around it, rather than just relying on the model to do everything.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
Most of our customers still find us through Google, but I’ve noticed that people are becoming more aware of AI astrology and are looking for more personalized answers instead of just reading generic horoscopes. We are also starting to pay attention to traffic from AI assistants like ChatGPT, although Google is still our main source of new users. I think this is going to change a lot in the coming years, and I want Veadicastro to be a platform people can discover not just through search engines, but also through AI recommendations.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
I would tell them to focus on building a product that actually solves a problem instead of chasing every new AI trend. In astrology, anyone can build a basic chatbot, but making it give meaningful answers based on real birth chart calculations is much harder. I would focus on improving the product, listening to users, and building organic traffic while slowly testing other ways to grow. I would also pay attention to how people discover products through AI assistants, because I think that will become more important. What I would ignore is the pressure to use every new AI tool or spend heavily on marketing before knowing what customers really want. At the end of the day, getting users is one thing, but giving them a reason to come back is what builds a real business.
Thank you to Arpit Uniyal and the team at Veadicastro for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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