Raj Vikramaditya (Striver)

Raj Vikramaditya, known online as Striver, is an Indian software engineer and educator best known as the creator of takeUforward, a coding-interview preparation platform whose free DSA sheets and YouTube lectures are used by a large share of Indian computer science students preparing for placements.

He studied at Jalpaiguri Government Engineering College in West Bengal, a college with little big-tech placement history. While still a student he began teaching data structures and algorithms to his juniors after official class hours, and several of them later landed jobs at companies such as Amazon. He went on to work as a software engineer at Media.net, Amazon and Google, including a stint with Google in Warsaw, Poland.

Alongside his job he built the takeUforward YouTube channel and a set of structured problem lists, including the Striver SDE Sheet and the A2Z DSA Sheet, which became standard study plans in Indian engineering colleges. The channel has passed one million subscribers. He later left Google to build takeUforward full time, turning it from a free content brand into a product company with TUF+, a paid tier with courses, a coding workspace, company-wise question banks, system design and aptitude prep, and personalized study plans.

By his own count on X, takeUforward has more than 1.5 million users and his YouTube audience is over a million. He is based in Bangalore and runs the company with a small team of engineers and content creators.

Striver matters to indie makers because he is one of the clearest Indian examples of an engineer who turned a teaching habit and a YouTube channel into an education business, using free resources as distribution and charging for depth.