Sandeep P Gaonkar

I studied engineering at STJIT, Ranebennur. The college was on the outskirts of town, and the canteen served only vegetarian food, so students would make the trip into town just for a cup of tea and snacks.

Across the road stood an empty shed. I rented it, and Chandru and his wife came in to cook and run it. We started with tea and egg omelettes.

I never named the place. The students did. They called it the Egg Shed.

When I left Ranebennur in 2012, Chandru and his wife kept the shed going.

In 2013 I came to Bangalore and joined Pipeco, where I worked closely with Bharat Devji Thakkar, my first mentor. Then I moved to Thattva Innovations, a hardware security and software firm.

Outside every hospital I saw the same juice stalls. For a patient, that was the only choice, and it was mostly sugar. My mother used to make me a drink from millets. My friend Rudresh and I turned her recipe into Moltz: millets and six seeds, one flavour for adults and one for kids. We had it tested in a lab and took the results to doctors.

We ran two hand carts outside hospitals, starting with Jayadeva. Two helpers ran them through the day. Rudresh and I both had jobs, so we took over after seven every night.

We had no registered company and no food licence. Startups were new, licences were hard to get, and there was no one to guide us. By the time we understood what we needed, it was too late.

We gave the carts to the two helpers, and they started something of their own.

After Moltz, I went back to building things for others.

At Cumulations I looked after business development and product for connected devices: the app on your phone that talks to an IoT device.

We worked on some challenging projects: the Davek umbrella, ToneTag, Autowiz, SenseGiz, Mihtra Wellness and Intel.

Most of what I learned there came from the founders, Madhu, Praveen and Pradeep. It was the first time I had people to learn from.

I understood how a product moves from an idea to something people can actually use, and how many decisions sit behind what looks simple on a screen.

For almost five years, alongside my job, I spent most weekends taking groups trekking: Kunti Betta near Bangalore, and Brahmagiri in Coorg. I planned the route, the transport and the food. A few cafes in the city helped spread the word.

A usual group was 12 to 18 people, most of them strangers to each other at the start. When a company came as a team, it was 25 or 30. It was where I learned to keep a group going when the climb got hard.

It was how I got out of the city. Some of the people I met on those trails later became Logicwall’s first clients.

Some of the people on those treks had an idea and no team to build it.

In 2017 I started Logicwall for people like them. We built web and mobile apps and tried to put a first working version in their hands quickly.

We built a trading platform for Blockoville, and did IoT and data work for 3M and Dialogues. Five early products went out. Three of those companies went on to raise money.

Our clients were happy, but we charged too little to keep going. In 2020 I chose to stop rather than stretch it thin. Covid arrived a month later.

Later that year I joined Dhiway, and spent the next five and a half years on one problem: how to make data trustworthy and verifiable across institutions. We built India’s first tokenisation and blockchain-anchored data assurance network. In simpler terms, it lets one institution trust a record from another without having to call and verify it manually.

We worked with ONDC, Protean, EkStep and hundreds of universities, so that certificates and records could be verified and shared securely. I was also an early contributor to the Finternet initiative led by Nandan Nilekani.

A large part of the work was about privacy: who can see a record, who has to give consent, and what happens to the data after it is shared. When India passed the DPDP Act, its data protection law, that thinking became part of how we built everything.

In 2025 an injury put me in hospital. When I got back home, I asked myself a question.

If something had happened to me that day, would my family have known where my savings and investments were?

The answer was no.

I spent the next two months interviewing 86 families, asking one thing: if something happened to you, could your family find and claim everything you own?

No one could say yes with confidence.

Most of what they had shared sat in spreadsheets and free notes apps.

“Tools that were never designed for inheritance.”

So we started UnClaimedX, to make sure families don’t lose what took a lifetime to build.