About me

Since 2016, I have led the Ridecell – the vertical platform for businesses that own and manage largest fleets in the world as CEO and co-founder. Our mission at Ridecell is to help the world run better. Back in 2016, we launched with the first Connected Electric fleet in the US, which happened to be BMW.

At Ridecell, my key focus areas are strategy, product vision, and fundraising. Our investors include Garry Tan at Initialized Capital, Raj Atluru at Activate Capital, YCombinator, and we are fortunate to have several of our partners and customers invest including BMW, Toyota, BNP Paribas, Penske Truck Leasing, LG, Sony, Denso, Munich Re, Cox Automotive, Deutsche Bahn Digital Ventures, Mitsui Corporation, Mitsubishi Corporation, Denso, Faurecia (Hella) and others.

I get very little time to build these days, but building things remains my passion and I am proud of the impactful innovations I have been part of creating at Ridecell and previous startups.

I started my career as a Research Engineer and a jack of several trades including sales-engineering and product at Ciphertrust, where we applied machine-learning (or as the kids call it these days, AI) to information security, the web and networks. I was part of a small team that built a machine learning-based reputation for every IP address on the Internet, web-based reputation scoring, used reputation for connection throttling (information security), and on image analysis for spam detection amongst others. Ciphertrust merged with Secure Computing for a $273M valuation, and later Secure Computing wac acquired by McAfee.

Inspired by my own challenges living in Atlanta without a functional car, I started working in 2008 on improving mobility and helping the world run better. Starting with building network-inspired transportation systems, we have innovated in several areas including multi-modal mobility and autonomous vehicle operations.

I started working on this mission back in 2008 on weekends. With help from my wife Bhumi and a few thousand dollars in seed funding, I started building the first real-time software (apps and algorithms) to optimize how we run the world. Later, my co-founder Arun joined us, and we built fleet automation software for high-utilization on-demand fleets owned by institutions like The University of California at Berkeley,  University of Alabama, Duke University and of courser Georgia Tech. Here are some things people have written about RideCell LLC. We also built one of the first real-time carpooling / ridesharing apps.

In 2011, I convinced Arun and Bhumi to move to the valley. We were part of YCombinator’s Winter 2012 Batch, where we launched InstantCab (Later called Summon) – the first ridesharing company (or as California calls it a Transportation Network Company) to legally operate in California and therefore, the first legal ridesharing company anywhere in the world!).

Before RideCell, I worked at McAfee, Secure Computing, CipherTrust, SpiDynamics, Georgia Tech, L&T and a few startups that never launched. Googlebot has kindly indexed some of my work there.

Back in the ’90s, before I could legally drive, I fell in love with my best friend @bhumis. Getting her to say yes may have been the only smart thing I did in my teenage years. We have a beautiful home in a leafy suburb of Atlanta, Georgia near a leafy park in Berkeley, CA where I spend most some of my time with our pup @mowgli on walks and some with our tiny sportsman coaching learning baseball.

I hope you will find something in these pages that is of use to you. If you do,  follow me on twitter: @aarjav.