Ishita Bhandari is the co-founder of Watto AI, a 2023 Y Combinator startup. Bhandari, formerly a software engineer, and her co-founders, Suryansh Soni and Rishabh Panwar, both prior engineering managers, had the initial idea for Watto when they were working in their respective tech firm positions. They perceived a significant amount of time being spent on generating documents that didn't directly contribute to the business or users. In response, they built an AI document generator, but the team desired to solve a deeper issue for companies: customer service response. Motivated by this observation, Watto AI pivoted to building AI voice assistants for restaurants and health-care clinics, aiming to alleviate communication challenges.

Bhandari's entrepreneurial journey began with Wordly, an award-winning vocabulary app for non-native English speakers that she founded during her undergraduate studies. She credits the iSchool for teaching her how to build user-centric products. When she joined the iSchool, she was a mechanical engineer curious about technology and its impacts on information. Her MSIM degree allowed her to hone her technical skills as well as business acumen which has been critical in her work.