Ambitious Labs

Building the #1 app idea accelerator in the world.

- Raised mid 6-figure angel round
- 7-figure annual revenue 
- Built a high performing enrollments department 
- 4.9 star google reviews
- Developed cutting edge ai powered learning platform

Founder + CEO

Closercademy

CEO, Founder

University of California, Berkeley

Guest lecturer for the Product Launch class under the Sutardja center for entrepreneurship & technology.

Teaching full-stack no-code AI development to business students interested in launching app startups.

Guest Lecturer

FlutterFlow

Championing the FlutterFlow product for the USA market.

Content Creator & Ambassador

First Check Ventures

- Syndicate member of First Check Ventures. I write $2k-$5k checks to a handful of promising companies every year. 

- Invested in Everything Green Organics, a farm to table startup out of Windsor, California.

Angel Investor

Yummy 

Venezuela’s super app. Doordash + Uber. Invested very early alongside FCV syndicate.

Angel Investor via First Check Ventures

PrizePicks

- #1 App for Sports in the iOS App Store
- #1 Daily Fantasy Sports App in the Country 2022
- Senior Mobile Engineer owning CI/CD, release management and user acquisition engineering

Head of Mobile & Growth Engineering

- Lead product engineering of top a 10 Sports App in iOS App Store
- Day to day: React, CapacitorJS, Swift/Java, Growth Marketing, App Analytics, AdTech, Product Marketing, Re-engagement
- Achieved industry leading engagement rates by developing new features against KPI goals. (CAC, virality co-efficient, etc) 
- Built a world class marketing tech stack in close collaboration with Marketing and Data Science.

Head Mobile Engineer

Season Share

Co founded and led product and engineering. Worked closely with VPs at major league teams to earn buy in for our products. Responsible for deploying 50+ products in market generating 10s of millions of dollars of revenue for our partners. Architected a distributed system capable of supporting 500k MAUs & high traffic on-sale windows.

Co-founder + CTO 

Hourglass Education Technology Solutions, LLC

Worked on cutting edge institutional education software. Mentored on ReactJS best practices. Individual contributor in a disciplined agile/scrum environment.

Senior Mobile App Engineer (React Native) 

San Jose State University

Instructional Assistant 

Grew up in a small town and had to work extra hard to get my foot in the door working on cool tech startups. My first job at age 15 was fixing iPhone screens in the mall. Then I scooped ice cream at Cold Stone Creamery and bussed tables at a local airport restaurant to pay for college. 

After football practice in high school I'd be learning how to code on CodeAcademy. People thought I was a nerd. 

Fast forward 10 years -- I've built multiple apps, b2b SaaS, internet businesses, websites, and e-commerce businesses that have generated over $100m collectively. 

I got to work remotely, travel to 12+ countries, invest in real estate and stocks and built a fruitful living for myself. 

Learning how to build apps changed my life. Now I’m on a mission to teach 10,000 people how to build apps.

Alim Charaniya

Default

Co-founded and scaled a consulting firm to a 45-person engineering team delivering full-stack products for venture-backed startups, including Swiggy, Cure.fit, Zenoti, Ninjacart, and Atlan. Contributed to generate lifetime revenue of $3 million.

Some projects I led: 

1. Bijak (Android app for agri-trader lending), managing a 15-person team; ensuring offline-first functionality, sync reliability, and secure transaction histories in challenging network environments.

2. Diagnosed Postgres latency issues in a high-volume transaction system - tuned indexes and refactored ORM queries, improving p95 by 30-50% across key customer workflows.

3. Led design of a Redis-backed rate limiter using sliding window logic for a CRM. Reduced 3rd-party API rejections by 90% during peak loads and enabling faster data syncs for customers.

Software Architect/Partner

Level AI

Level AI is a San Francisco based AI startup in the conversation AI space. 

I was the first engineering hire, tasked with building product architecture, backend services and building a team. 

Architected and delivered a conversational AI prototype for customer service reps using Google STT and RASA. 

Designed and implemented the intent/entity extraction layer using RASA NLU trained on synthetic retail dialogue data for different brands or use-cases.

Technical Lead

AcadView

Acadview was an EdTech platform for skilling engineering students on programming for various platforms such as python, web development, machine learning and android. We conducted online and offline lectures to skill over 5000 students across North India. The startup was acquired by Upgrad (a leading edTech company in India in 2018). 

My role at acadview was that of a full stack entrepreneur:

1. Built a high performant engineering team from scratch on a monthly budget of $3000, I achieved this by leveraging good folks who needed just the right amount of mentorship on engineering and technology. 

2. Built a data ingestion framework which could handle excel sheets of different formats and inconsistencies (we were getting semi-structured data from universities). Built a PDF generation pipeline which could scale to millions of PDFs.

3. Built the first few version of the LMS (both frontend and backend) that was used to conduct classes, schedule assignments, conduct project evaluations. 

4. Lead the operations team in both a strategic and executive capacity to select high quality instructors and support. 

5. Led the content effort to generate relevant content which was in tune with our target audience by using lay-person language, feynman technique, memes.

6. Led the product effort to product high quality PRDs for the engineering team.

CTO (Acquired by UpGrad)

Frankly.me

Second engineering hire at frankly. Frankly was a video Q & A platform for celebrities and influencers. One could ask a question to a celebrity and get a video response. In a short time span we on-boarded esteemed personalities from politics, bollywood and sports. 

a. Built the search system using ElasticSearch, the search was done on usernames, query phrases, video meta data and personalized based on user preferences and geography. 

b. Developed a unified notification service (web + mobile) that improved user engagement by 15% and 7-day retention by 20%. Focused on reliable fanout and device targeting.

c. Picked up a bit of android development as well, built a couple of small features and bug fixes on the app.

Software Engineer

Quizot

Quizot was a content platform meant for quizzers and trivia lovers. We differentiated ourselves by carrying highly curated content and targeting a niche category early on. To seed the platform with content I launched a virtual internship program. At it’s peak the platform had ~30,000 MAU with 800,000 pieces of content consumed every month. We were bootstrapped. 

I learnt a lot about software development, product development, user delight via engineering, content management, user generated content, product management during this stint.

CTO/Founder

Deloitte

Started my career as a QA (manual testing)

Business Technology Analyst

Technical leader and serial founder with a proven track record of scaling orgs, architecting resilient systems, and delivering outcomes across AI, fintech, and edtech.

Having built multiple startups. I bring a rare blend of technical depth and business acumen. As someone who’s owned P&L and led engineering, I build for impact, not complexity. My strength lies in aligning tech with business goals, shipping robust products, and knowing when to optimize for speed vs. scale.

taplio

The Battle

Alim Charaniya

Varun Jain

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