A Deserta Lab company · Pilot opening soon

Discover products,
not just stores.

LAONI is an AI-native hyperlocal commerce network. It turns the shops around you into one searchable, intelligent marketplace — so what's in stock nearby finally becomes visible, and arrives in minutes.

For shoppers who want local & instant · for merchants who want to be found · built by Deserta Lab, the intelligence layer for local commerce.

Join early access → Register your store Help Us Build LAONI
Products-first
Search intent, not storefronts
2 km
Hyperlocal discovery radius
3 apps
Customer · Merchant · Rider
AI-native
Intelligence as infrastructure
Parent company Deserta Lab AI-native infrastructure for local commerce
→
First product LAONI The hyperlocal commerce network
Why LAONI

Local commerce is huge — and almost entirely uncoordinated.

India's MSME sector drives roughly 30% of GDP and employs over 28 crore people. Yet it runs on disconnected stores, invisible inventory, and guesswork. That's not a technology gap — it's a coordination gap, and it's exactly the gap LAONI is built to close.

◷

Inventory is invisible

What's in stock on the shelf next door is impossible to discover online. LAONI makes nearby supply searchable in real time.

◎

Merchants can't be found

Local shops have no honest path to discoverability. LAONI surfaces them through the products people are actually searching for.

✦

Decisions are slow

Shoppers browse store by store. LAONI starts from intent and returns the right product, the nearest merchant, and the fastest route.

Why now

The pieces finally exist in the same place.

Hyperlocal commerce has been attempted before. What's changed is the convergence that makes an intelligence-first approach possible today.

Digital rails
UPI and smartphones reach the smallest kirana — payments and ordering are no longer the blocker they once were.
AI maturity
Embeddings, semantic search, and LLMs can finally understand messy real-world product intent at low cost.
Delivery density
Dense neighbourhoods make sub-15-minute local delivery economically viable when routing is intelligent.
Merchant readiness
Local merchants want discoverability without surrendering their business — the appetite for the right tool is real.
Product philosophy

Five principles guide everything we build.

①

Discovery first

Products are discovered before merchants. Intent leads to products, products lead to merchants, merchants lead to transactions.

②

Intelligence native

Intelligence isn't a feature bolted on top. Every layer of the platform exists to understand and improve commerce activity.

③

Merchant first

Merchants are the source of supply. We reduce their operational complexity while increasing their operational intelligence.

④

Progressive evolution

Complexity is introduced only when scale demands it. We avoid premature engineering and earn every layer.

⑤

Infrastructure thinking

Every decision must support future graph, forecasting, recommendation, and agent systems. We build for the long arc.

★

One message

Deserta Lab is building AI-native infrastructure for the future of local commerce. LAONI is the first product on that vision.

AI architecture

From a sentence of intent to a basket at your door.

A customer says what they want in plain words. LAONI moves that intent through eight intelligent stages — each one querying the systems beneath it — and returns a buyable, optimised plan. This is a concept diagram of the architecture in development.

1
Intent
A natural-language request or a tapped search.
2
AI understanding
Parses budget, household, quantity and constraints.
3
Product search
Keyword + semantic + vector retrieval across catalogues.
4
Recommendation engine
Ranks and fills gaps using personal and community signals.
5
Commerce graph
Resolves what's nearby, in stock, and related.
6
Basket optimisation
Balances price, distance and availability into a plan.
7
Checkout
One-tap payment via UPI.
8
Fulfilment
Routed to a rider and tracked to the door.
The commerce graph

Customers, merchants, products, inventory, locations — one connected memory.

Traditional databases store records. Intelligence needs relationships. The commerce graph is the memory layer of the ecosystem: every purchase, view, and search becomes an edge that makes discovery, recommendations, and forecasting smarter.

Core node Entity Transaction Relationship edge
Network effects

A self-reinforcing intelligence loop.

Each new merchant adds inventory. More inventory improves discovery. Better discovery attracts more shoppers. More activity generates more data. More data sharpens the intelligence — which attracts more merchants.

More merchants→ More inventory→ Better discovery→ More customers→ More data→ Better intelligence↺
Technology overview

An intelligence-first stack, built to scale in stages.

A shared mobile and backend foundation that earns its complexity. The intelligence systems — search, recommendations, graph, agents — layer on as the network grows.

▤

Apps & web

Flutter for the Customer, Merchant and Rider apps on a shared codebase. Next.js + TypeScript for the Super Admin platform.

▥

Backend

NestJS + Node.js as a modular monolith first, splitting into services only when scale requires it.

▦

Data

PostgreSQL for transactions, Redis for real-time state, OpenSearch for discovery, and a graph store for relationships.

⌕

Search

Three layers — keyword, semantic, and AI — over an index plus a vector database and embedding models.

◴

Forecasting

Demand, inventory, and revenue prediction so merchants stock what sells and shoppers find it in stock.

⚇

Agents

A path toward specialised agents — customer, merchant, logistics, settlement — coordinated by a supervisor.

Cold start
< 2s
Search
< 300ms
Product load
< 500ms
Cart update
< 200ms
Checkout
< 2s
AI response
< 3s
⚑ These are engineering targets we're designing toward — not production measurements. The product is pre-launch.
Roadmap

Built to grow in four stages.

Infrastructure scales with the network, not ahead of it. Each stage unlocks the next layer of intelligence.

Stage 1
0–300 merchants
  • Single region pilot
  • Core commerce: order, pay, deliver
  • PostgreSQL + Redis
  • Flutter + NestJS foundation
Stage 2
1,000+ merchants
  • Search infrastructure
  • Monitoring & observability
  • Containerisation
  • Merchant intelligence v1
Stage 3
10,000+ merchants
  • Event-driven architecture
  • Recommendation systems
  • Forecasting systems
  • Discovery feed at scale
Stage 4
100,000+ merchants
  • Commerce graph
  • AI shopping assistant
  • Multi-agent platform
  • Distributed architecture
About Deserta Lab

We build AI-native infrastructure for local commerce.

Deserta Lab is the parent company behind LAONI. We exist to make local commerce as searchable as information, as discoverable as content, and as intelligent as modern AI. LAONI is our first product — and the first proof of that thesis.

◐

Mission

Empower local businesses with technology — not replace them. Make neighbourhood commerce discoverable, intelligent, and coordinated.

◓

Vision

An intelligence layer that understands, predicts, and coordinates commerce across customers, merchants, products, inventory, logistics, and locations.

◑

Long-term ambition

Beyond a single app: a coordination infrastructure for local economies, with LAONI as the first of many products built on it.

Founder's letter

Why we're building this.

The shops on your street already hold everything you need. The problem was never supply. It was that nobody could see it, find it, or coordinate it.

I grew up around small businesses, and the pattern was always the same: enormous effort, real quality, and almost no way to be discovered beyond the people who already walked past the door. Meanwhile, the tools that could help kept arriving as marketplaces that flattened merchants into interchangeable line items.

Deserta Lab started from a different belief — that the answer isn't another marketplace, it's an intelligence layer. Something that begins with what a customer actually wants, finds the right product, and only then connects them to the merchant who has it nearby. LAONI is that idea, made real.

We're early, and we're honest about it. There's no finished dashboard to show you yet — just a clear architecture, a working philosophy, and a commitment to build with merchants rather than over them. If that resonates, join us early. The first neighbourhoods we light up will shape everything that follows.

Kabir Bishnoi
Founder, Deserta Lab
Security & privacy

Security-first, from the first line of code.

Merchant and customer trust is the foundation of a commerce network. These are the principles the platform is being designed around.

JWT & OAuth auth
Role-based access
Encryption in transit & at rest
Fraud detection
Rate limiting
Audit logging
Backups
Disaster recovery
Merchant research · ಮಾರುಕಟ್ಟೆ ಸಂಶೋಧನೆ

Help us build LAONI.

Before we build the product, we want to understand your shop. This is research, not a sales pitch — under 3 minutes, 12 questions, in English and Kannada. Your answers directly shape what we build first.

Tell us about your business — your challenges, your delivery radius, and what would actually help. ನಿಮ್ಮ ವ್ಯಾಪಾರದ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ತಿಳಿಸಿ.

Take the Merchant Survey · ಸಮೀಕ್ಷೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಭಾಗವಹಿಸಿ →
Get involved

Be early to the network.

Two ways in: join the early-access waitlist as a shopper or rider, or register your store to be among the first merchants when we go live.

Careers

Build the intelligence layer for local commerce.

We're a small, early team at Deserta Lab building LAONI from first principles. If infrastructure, AI, and real-world commerce excite you, we'd love to talk — even if you don't see your exact role listed.

careers@desertalab.com
Founding Engineer · Backend
NestJS · PostgreSQL · search
Remote / India
Flutter Engineer
Customer · Merchant · Rider apps
Remote / India
AI / ML Engineer
Search · recommendations · graph
Remote / India
Merchant Growth (Pilot)
On-ground, Mysuru
Mysuru
FAQ

Questions, answered honestly.

Is LAONI live yet?

Not yet. We're pre-product and preparing a pilot. Everything on this site is the vision and architecture we're building toward — there are no live numbers, dashboards, or users to show, and we won't fake them.

What's the difference between Deserta Lab and LAONI?

Deserta Lab is the parent company building AI-native infrastructure for local commerce. LAONI is its first product — the hyperlocal commerce network built on that infrastructure.

How is LAONI different from existing delivery apps?

Most apps are store-first: you pick a store, then browse. LAONI is product-first — you start from what you want, and the platform finds the right product and the nearest merchant who has it, powered by a commerce graph and AI.

What does it cost a merchant to join?

We're finalising pilot terms with our first merchants. The research survey and registration help us design something that genuinely works for local shops — register your interest and we'll share details directly.

Where are you launching first?

Our initial pilot is focused on Mysuru, zone by zone. Early-access and merchant registrations help us decide which neighbourhoods light up first.

How is my data handled?

Survey and registration responses are used only for research, product development, merchant onboarding, and pilot communication. See our Privacy Policy for details.

Help shape the first AI-native local commerce network.

Join early access, register your store, or take the 3-minute merchant survey. The first neighbourhoods set the direction.

Join early access → Help Us Build LAONI