February 12, 2026 | By Jennifer Levin

Asher A. Naveen (SF27) is a natural-born problem solver with top-tier tech know-how. As a teen in Bengaluru, the southern Indian city formerly known as Bangalore, he built an internationally accessible educational platform just in time for the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. And just this past academic year, while employed by the school’s Student Activities Center (SAC), Asher analyzed key data to help his boss prove that students who use the fitness facility and participate in intramural sports are more likely to stay at St. John’s Santa Fe than those who don’t.

“After the retention survey,” says Mary Anne Burke, who serves as the SAC’s director, “I knew he had the skills to help me with another long-standing issue, so I asked him if he could build out a prototype he’d shown me and design an app to streamline our entire operation.”

Asher quickly built a website known as Orhuk, which centralized shift-to-shift staff communication, equipment and facilities rentals, and other SAC functions. Gone was the old chaos of front-desk sticky notes, texts, and chats, which once served to coordinate tasks and transmit information among 10 student employees.

“I built the app based on a real necessity I saw while working the front desk at the SAC during my freshman and sophomore years. That summer, I started solving it right there next to the rock-climbing wall,” Asher says. “I fixed an old espresso machine and took it in there for the entire month I was developing the app. I’d work out, code, drink coffee, repeat. I make beautiful latte art.”

“I did wonder when he slept,” Burke jokes. She was able to pay Asher for his exceptional work as a campus employee using donor funds meant to support SAC operations. The new dashboard system, she adds, which has been up and running since September 2025, has “improved just about everything around here.”

Today, Orhuk is a tech startup with a $12 million valuation backed by Albuquerque-based business investor Andy Lim, who recently came aboard as Asher’s co-founder. The company was set in motion after Asher consulted Charlie Bergman, a former director and senior advisor in Santa Fe’s Office of Personal and Professional Development (OPPD), while searching for additional business mentorship.

Bergman knew Asher as an exceptionally sophisticated member of the student business club who had been capable of discussing world economics and banking in his freshman year. “He’s obviously an entrepreneur,” Bergman says, “so I went to an old friend, Kevin MacDonald, who handles boutique mergers and acquisitions. He knew someone for Asher to talk to.” That someone happened to be Lim.

What was supposed to be an informational meeting about entrepreneurship between Lim and Asher quickly turned into a discussion about launching Asher’s end-to-end business management software as a real company. “I saw a lot of myself in Asher when I was young,” Lim says. “His initial product for the college was really amazing—but on top of that, I believe Asher is a good person, and I’m honored to call him a partner.”

Asher grew up in Bengaluru, a tech hub in India that's likened to Silicon Valley. He has been coding since age 10 and is well-versed in more than a dozen programming languages. Without external guidance, he designed a simple dating app for his junior high classmates. (“We had to shut that down.”) He began experimenting with chat boxes in 2017—long before the widespread emergence of large language models—with very little understanding of the field’s complexity. He’s also surprisingly well-rounded as both a classically trained pianist and a campus DJ, and in 2019, he competed in a state badminton championship.

While most programmers of Asher’s caliber would surely head to MIT or Stanford—or skip college altogether—he knew he needed exactly what St. John’s Santa Fe had to offer. “I studied programming in my last two years of high school, and I barely had to crack a book. I wanted to really learn something,” he says of his decision to spend four years in the high desert of New Mexico. “St. John’s is way outside my comfort zone.”

Learning about ancient mathematics, for example, has provided Asher with valuable insight regarding the evolution of computing and technology. “I looked at the calculations of Copernicus,” he says. “ He had samples of data from hundreds of years of planetary motions, and he mapped it into specific data sets. He was essentially the world’s first data analyst.”

Furthermore, he adds, learning how to communicate with his classmates in seminar has prepared him for the real world in a way that a cookie-cutter education in computer science never could: “There’s a difference between how ideas shape up in my head and being able to explain their relevance to other people.”

Bergman, who continues to serve as a mentor to Asher, sees nothing but potential in the college junior: “He has a rare mix of creative energy and discipline. I’m also confident that he’ll be able to temper rightful enthusiasm about the next great idea with a humanistic evaluation of its true benefits to mankind.”