Rakesh Gidwani
Co-Founder & CTO
AION
Venture Partner & Advisor
Protagonist.co
A seasoned tech and business leader with over 20 years of experience across financial institutions, startups, venture investing and Web3, Rakesh has worked at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Two Sigma, where he was Senior Vice President of Engineering, building high-frequency trading systems across multiple asset classes. He also spent a decade in the startup ecosystem, notably as a Senior Director of Engineering at Jet.com (acquired by Walmart for $ 3.3B) and as CTO at Voyager, a US-based retail crypto brokerage. Most recently, he was Partner & CTO at Protagonist, an early-stage investment firm focused on Web2, Web3, and AI, where he led investments in companies such as EigenLayer, Sentient, FHEnix, and RedStone.