Through PHILIA LIFE and its initiative, SocialFit, the founder is bringing her experience in technology, innovation, and behavioral science to a question: how can digital experiences create meaningful human connections?
Technology makes it possible to reach someone across the world in seconds. Yet being connected online does not always translate into feeling connected in everyday life.
For Sohini Sengupta, Founder and CEO of PHILIA LIFE, that gap is the starting point for a new entrepreneurial chapter. Drawing on 20 years of experience across Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, she is exploring how artificial intelligence and behavioral science can support individual and societal well-being.
Her ambition centres on a different measure of technological progress: the quality of the relationships it helps people build.
A Career at the Intersection of Technology and Human Behaviour
Sohini’s professional background spans financial services, customer experience, digital transformation, and strategic innovation, including roles at Finastra and Oracle.
Across these areas, her work has brought together business design, service innovation, and design thinking. Her interests also extend to financial resilience and building solutions capable of creating societal impact at scale.
That experience now informs her work at PHILIA LIFE, where she is applying innovation and psychology to questions about human potential.
The move into entrepreneurship brings those interests into focus. After nearly two decades in a corporate career, she is putting her professional experience behind a vision for technology that gives trust, reciprocity, and real-world relationships a more central role.
Rethinking the Attention Economy
At the heart of Sohini’s vision is a critique of how digital businesses create value.
In her view, the past two decades have seen business models become increasingly effective at monetising attention. Clicks, impressions, and continuous scrolling have become powerful commercial measures, while the value of meaningful human interaction can be harder to capture.
She describes the shift she wants to explore as moving from the “dopamine economy” towards the “oxytocin economy.”
The framing draws inspiration from neuroeconomist Dr. Paul Zak’s research into oxytocin and trust, including experimental work examining the association between oxytocin levels and responses to intentional acts of trust.
For Sohini, this provides a starting point for a broader question about business and society:
“How might we move beyond an economic model that rewards extraction over reciprocity, and explore a different basis for value creation?”
Her proposed direction places greater emphasis on trust, shared experiences, and the relationships that contribute to human flourishing.
Introducing SocialFit by Philia Life
SocialFit is the initiative through which Sohini is beginning to put that vision into practice.
She describes it as a trust-based social intelligence infrastructure for cities, designed to help people translate digital intent into real-world connection.
The distinction matters to her vision. SocialFit is conceived as a bridge between online interactions and offline experiences, helping create space for relationships and possibilities beyond the screen.
Its starting point is Dubai, with plans to expand across cities globally.
The ambition is to build a social fabric in which technology helps people discover opportunities to connect, participate, and develop relationships in the places where they live.
A Founder’s Next Chapter
Sohini’s journey brings a human question into a field often defined by technical capability: what should innovation help people experience?
Through PHILIA LIFE, she is exploring how AI and behavioral science can contribute to well-being, alongside their commercial applications. SocialFit gives that ambition a specific direction—using digital tools to help make real-world connection more accessible.
The work ahead will involve translating that vision into experiences people choose to make part of their lives. For now, her direction is clear: build around trust, encourage reciprocity, and create more opportunities for people to meet meaningfully.
Her invitation captures the spirit of this new chapter:
“Let’s design for serendipity.”
By The Founder Chronicles