Jon Stojan
Image credit: Parth Nandaniya
For many people living in remote, rural areas, making it big in the fast-paced tech world may seem like an out-of-reach dream, as basic human needs take priority over programming languages and cutting-edge hardware. Parth Nandaniya was one such dreamer, developing a fascination with technology at a young age despite having scarce access to it in his home village in Gujarat, India.
As the former CTO of an award-winning Baltimore fintech startup, he’s successfully rewritten his future and become a role model for millions of people around the world who dream of making it big in tech.
A Small Village and a Big Dream
Even as a child in a technologically deprived village, Nandaniya was fascinated by computers and obsessed with technology’s potential to impact the world. “In the village where I grew up,” he recounts, “everyone knew what I wanted to do because I was so into computers and programming.”
Nandaniya dreamed of “building things from nothing” and making an impact in the world, propelling him to enroll at Gujarat Technological University in 2015 to study information technology. There, he specialized in React Native, a framework that simplifies mobile application development by using the same code to deploy to iOS, Android, and other platforms. At the same time, he became fascinated with the fast-paced world of startups, which can use consolidated technologies like React Native to innovate faster and more efficiently than larger enterprises.
He saw startups as the ultimate opportunity to build something from scratch, take risks, and solve real-world problems.
Building a Fintech App from the Ground Up
Nandaniya’s first real-world experience was joining Paris fintech Eversend, a multi-currency e-wallet platform. There, he worked as the company’s founding lead mobile engineer, one of the company’s five employees at the time, tasked with developing a currency transform app that would allow users across Africa to send and receive money.
“The CTO and I started building the app from scratch,” he says. “For nearly 2 1/2 years, I built the infrastructure, backend, frontend, and even performed customer support to build and launch the app.”
The startup showed enough promise to be one of 12 brands accepted into Google’s Launchpad Africa accelerator cohort in 2019. At age 21, Nandaniya was the youngest member of the cohort and got exposure to cutting-edge tech and a global startup network.
Though he started at Eversend working remotely from India with a salary of just a few hundred dollars a month, Nandaniya soon made his way to Silicon Valley, his salary expanding 60 times over. Now, in part due to his contributions, Eversend now serves more than one million customers in 11 African countries, supporting 12 currencies.
From Software Engineer to Technology Leadership
Soon after his time at Eversend, Nandaniya accepted a CTO position at Baltimore fintech Pocket Plan, a startup that connects financial advisors with potential clients.
“I had to build an entire technology structure from scratch again,” he says. “Because I was the CTO, I wasn’t just building and managing our infrastructure. I was also involved in pitching to investors and doing everything required to grow the company.”
However, Nandaniya proved to be up to this challenge. Under his leadership, Pocket Plan won first place in the 2021 Great Pumpkin Pitch competition, which recognized the most innovative startups in Maryland. Following this, the company secured a partnership with the Maryland Innovation Center, an initiative supported by the Howard County Economic Development Authority.
Engineering for Scale at Arketa
Nandaniya’s next venture would be with Arketa, a startup that creates white-label mobile apps for fitness studios.
There, as Arketa’s senior software engineer, Nandaniya built over 1,000 customized apps for individual fitness studios. “React Native has never been used at this scale before,” he says. “Through our white-label app system, we can help fitness studio owners build their own custom app in 45 minutes or less.”
This innovation allowed small business owners to rapidly scale despite the post-pandemic plights that troubled many brick-and-mortar businesses. In its seed round of fundraising, Arketa received more than $7 million in funding, which included backing from the prestigious startup accelerator Y Combinator. Recently, it raised another $18.2 million from an additional eight investors.
Looking Forward
Nandaniya is devoted to continuing to make a real-world difference by applying his expertise at startups that share his aspirations and passion. Whether he’s empowering multi-currency transfers or helping small businesses expand their services, every move is in support of his goal to solve real-world problems through technology.
His ongoing dream, he says, is to “keep developing cutting-edge technology in Silicon Valley and make an even greater impact on the world by building innovative solutions.”
To follow his journey as he makes his vision a reality, follow Parth Nandaniya on LinkedIn.