Mohak Gupta is the founder of talo, a self-hosted, UPI-first money app for flatmates. He is a full-stack engineer and technical lead who has shipped backend systems, mobile products, analytics platforms, AI workflows, and startup infrastructure across fintech, SaaS, and consumer software.
talo is where my product taste, systems background, and actual flat life meet. It is built for recurring shared home money, not holiday groups, not generic expense logging, and definitely not noisy fintech theatrics.
Mohak Gupta
Full-stack engineer, technical lead, systems builder, startup engineer.
I like products that feel thoughtful on the surface and brutally competent underneath. The interface should feel calm. The system behind it should be fast, scalable, and hard to break.
Build something useful, make it feel better than the category norm, and treat the messy real-world details as the main work, not edge cases.
talo started from a very unglamorous problem: four engineers in one flat, recurring rent, messy grocery math, UPI everywhere, and no product that really understood shared home life in India.
I had already spent years building systems in fast-moving startups, from mobile apps and search infrastructure to analytics platforms, distributed backend services, and AI-heavy internal tooling. So when the spreadsheet-and-Splitwise routine got annoying enough, my instinct was simple: build the thing I wished already existed.
That is still how I think about talo. It should feel calm enough to live with every day, but be technically sharp enough to handle real money workflows, real flat dynamics, and the messy operational details that most expense apps ignore.
01
Rent, groceries, Wi-Fi, utilities, UPI everywhere, and no tool that really understood shared home life in India.
02
Spreadsheets broke, upgrade prompts got annoying, and the product taste was miles away from how a calm money tool should feel.
03
That turned into talo: self-hosted, UPI-first, quiet on the surface, serious underneath.
Jan 2026 - Feb 2026
CloudHireGurugram, India
Led overall technology strategy and execution across multiple product verticals and a 25+ member cross-functional engineering organization.
Feb 2023 - Jan 2024
Teak FinanceStealth
Built quantitative systems, trading infrastructure, and data products for a stealth fintech and crypto intelligence startup.
Sep 2023 - Dec 2023
TheHomeworkApp / Infybytes AI LabsRemote
Built a sophisticated animation engine and rendering workflow for an interactive product surface.
Sep 2021 - Sep 2023
Paavan / BharatFirst TechnologiesGurugram, India
Handled end-to-end product development across mobile, backend, and internal tooling while leading a small engineering team.
Move quickly on the real product tension, but keep the core system design defensible. Shipping and rigor are not opposites.
The best architecture decision is the one that makes the user experience simpler, calmer, and easier to trust six months later.
I like systems that grow cleanly: good abstractions, fewer bottlenecks, and complexity added only where the product truly needs it.
If something matters, I want to understand it end to end: product, architecture, operations, and the edge cases that show up in production.
That is not a gimmick. It is a philosophy. Own the stack, keep the product close to the people using it, and build with enough conviction that the software can live in the same room as the problem.
Runs on
A box in the apartment
Stack
Next, TypeScript, Postgres
Product taste
Calm, warm, deliberate
Core idea
UPI-first home money
The short version lives here. The detailed version covers the career arc, startup work, systems background, and how I like to build.
Short bio
Mohak Gupta is the founder of talo, a self-hosted, UPI-first money app for flatmates. He is a full-stack engineer and technical lead who has shipped backend systems, mobile products, analytics platforms, AI workflows, and startup infrastructure across fintech, SaaS, and consumer software.
Medium bio
Mohak Gupta is a full-stack engineer, technical lead, and systems builder based in Gurugram. He founded talo after moving into a flat with three other engineers and deciding that rent splitting in India deserved something better than spreadsheets and upgrade prompts. Before talo, he led engineering and infrastructure work across CloudHire, Paavan, TheHomeworkApp, and Teak Finance, building mobile apps, backend systems, analytics pipelines, AI-native workflows, and distributed infrastructure.
Direct contact
mohakgupta102@gmail.comUse it, break it, tell me what feels smart, and tell me what still feels clumsy. This product is better when real flatmates push on it.