About
I build products and the companies around them, mostly on the technical side. In 2013 my co-founder Bhavya Gohil and I were engineering students in Mumbai trying to answer a narrow question: could a blind player play a computer on a real board, with real pieces? The answer became a board whose pieces move by themselves.
That was Square Off. We showed the prototype at Maker Faire Rome in 2014, raised $220,000 on Kickstarter in 24 days against a $50,000 goal, and a later campaign passed a million. The board shipped to more than 50 countries. I owned the product and the platform: the hardware, the firmware, the apps, and the manufacturing lines we set up across India and China. Miko acquired a majority stake in 2022.
Today I run engineering at Horizon Tech Ventures in the Bay Area, where the same two of us do for other companies what we did for our own: strategy, software, and growth, as one team. I am also a general aviation pilot, based at Oakland, which is where most of my side projects come from. I build the small tools I wanted to exist while flying.
Now
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Co-founder and CTO. A technology and growth partner in the San Francisco Bay Area. We set the strategy, build the software and the brand, and run the marketing, without the handoff between them. I own everything on the engineering side.
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Built it. A free checklist editor for pilots: normal, abnormal and emergency procedures that print exactly like the preview, in kneeboard and cockpit formats. It came out of my own flying rather than a business plan, and it is free for personal use. No account needed to start.
Work
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Square Off
Co-founder and CTO. The world's first telerobotic chessboard: a real wooden board where your opponent's pieces glide into place on their own, whether they are across the table or across the planet. Built under Infivention Technologies, venture-backed across multiple rounds, and shipped to 50+ countries. Miko, the consumer robotics company, acquired a majority stake in 2022.
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Cross-border property investing, built end to end. A platform for buying Dubai off-plan property from abroad, with verified market data and live pricing. We built the whole stack, from the marketplace a buyer sees to the backend behind it.
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A freight forwarder of 25 years that still quoted over phone and email. We rebuilt it as a digital logistics platform: self-serve instant rates, live multi-mode tracking, and a customer portal.
Press
- Forbes, 2023 Maximizing Success In Manufacturing: Five Essential Tips. Written by me, on setting up production lines across countries.
- Forbes, 2022 30 Under 30 Asia, consumer technology. Listed with Bhavya Gohil for Square Off.
- Forbes India, 2018 Square Off: Back to the chess board. Monica Bathija on how the board started as an accessible chessboard for blind players.
- ChessBase, 2016 World's smartest chess board is here. Sagar Shah, written when the first board shipped.
- TechCrunch, 2022 Miko Robotics acquires majority stake in AI chess startup, Square Off