While investing through crypto's early years gave me conviction, my professional career was sharpening a different edge. I started building predictive models and analytics systems — the kind of work where you learn to find signal in noise. That instinct has defined everything since.
When blockchain emerged in enterprise, I built one of India's first Blockchain Centers of Excellence, growing a practice from zero to $2.5M in its first year. The startup world came next — as CTO of a blockchain media startup, I designed token economies and learned what it takes to build from nothing. Then Wipro, where I led presales and partnerships for digital asset solutions across Europe, North America, and India — working with partners like R3, Microsoft, AWS, and Hedera.
“The best opportunities in crypto are in the places most people avoid — unclear regulation, new markets, unbuilt infrastructure. That's where I've spent my entire career.”
But the real transformation came when my investor instincts and operator skills converged in the exchange world — and a pattern emerged. Every role since has involved building something from scratch in markets where nothing was certain.
At WazirX, I took over the API product, built relationships with institutional brokers and HFTs, and turned a scattered liquidity approach into a formal market maker program that drove a 3x growth in quarterly revenues and pushed peak daily volumes to $600M. Then senior leadership left the company, and I moved on. At VALR, I stepped into the Country Head role to launch a South African exchange in India — secured the FIU registration, secured banking partnerships with major Indian financial institutions when most banks refused to service crypto firms, got the product market-ready — then India introduced a 1% TDS on crypto that collapsed market volumes by roughly 98%. Between the decimated market and the risk that Indian authorities could make unpredictable demands — including potentially freezing shared cold wallets with the SA business — I worked with leadership to make the call: pause India, redirect to UAE expansion. In parallel, drove SA's commercial transformation to 80%+ market share. At 39K Group, I built a market-making division to $45K MRR with a 3-person team — then chose to wind it down when regulatory changes threatened the firm's core license.
Three builds, three external forces, three times I read the risk correctly and moved forward. Every role has had the same thread: finding the commercial edge in uncertain, regulated crypto markets — building the relationships that make it work, and having the judgment to know when to pivot.