Since the advent of the smartphone in the early 2000s, mobile applications have proliferated. Some apps capture the imagination to completely transform daily life, and others are eventually removed from the phone’s home screen before being deleted altogether. Nilesh Rathore has witnessed much of this coming and going and, leveraging his own expertise, has managed to pin down what gives an app staying power and which apps might be destined for the deleted folder.
With the digital revolution, at least one thing has been made abundantly clear: consumers have expectations, and mobile app makers must learn how to meet or exceed those demands. This space is precisely where Rathore has staked his claim, learning all he can about human behavior to make technology work for people rather than the other way around.
A simple idea to be sure, but making complex technology easier and more accessible is certainly not without challenges. For the past decade, Rathore has continued navigating these complexities, on an ever-expanding quest to make tech easy and workable for everyday users.
Starting his journey in India, Rathore began his career working on a telecom application that served over 100 million users. He later leveraged this experience to co-found a food-tech startup that would go on to deliver over 100,000 meals. Most recently, Rathore turned to the fast-changing world of cryptocurrencies. With a simple but consistent approach of starting with the user, Rathore grew his digital asset social platform, Orb, to over half a million users. Today, Rathore is continuing his user-centric approach in creating the next generation of tech.
Limits Turned Architectural Opportunities
Getting his start in a nation with over a billion people, a founder could be forgiven for not putting people at the top of his priority list when creating new tech. After all, how can millions, if not billions, be at once satisfied with a single product? Yet, for Rathore, the user would always come first. Understanding how to make technology intuitive for an incredibly diverse user base became the driving force behind each of his ventures.
Beyond a massive population, India presented other challenges for Rathore to overcome in the development of mobile applications. He recounts these challenges, stating that “In India, you’re building for ₹5,000 phones with 1GB RAM, spotty 3G, users who watch their battery percentage like a hawk,” Rathore explains. “You learn to optimize for the worst case, not the best.” This mindset would be integral to his future work as well, as he prioritized user interface and speed over impressive, but complex, blockchain features.
Building a Foundation on Products Users Love
Later, Rathore’s journey brought him stateside, to the tech-friendly West Coast. Though the technical infrastructure, among other things, was vastly different in San Francisco, Rathore reiterated the importance of creating user-centric tech. His initiative was a concept for a decentralized social app with Graph Hack. Rathore was awarded $15,000 in prizes for the concept, and that weekend project would later become Orb.
Later, Rathore would serve as co-founder for the Flutter app. But rather than walking into investor meetings with a concept alone, Rathore developed and deployed the application himself. Rathore insisted on “real numbers before talking to investors” so that when it was time to raise funds, they “weren’t pitching a deck (but) showing actual users, actual engagement, and a community that genuinely loved the product.”
Demonstrating real user experience became a winning formula. The Orb app became synonymous with a clean, usable interface in the often muddled world of crypto exchange. Adding to the social appeal of the application, many users would share screenshots of the Orb interface in admiration of the design. Users spanned the gap between crypto enthusiasts and creatives who showed up to enjoy the artistic appeal instead of having to focus on mastering a tech-centric and confusing interface.
By early autumn of 2023, Orb closed a $2.3 million round and received investments from Stani and Kulechov, Sandeep Nailwal, and Founders Inc.’s Furqan Rydhan. Meanwhile, the platform served to popularize digital assets, growing to over 500,000 users.
Creating Crypto Clubs: How Orb Made Decentralization More Communal
Decentralized finance and community may, on its surface, appear to be concepts somewhat at odds. But under Rathore’s leadership, this feature became integral to Orb’s success. These clubs enabled decentralized communities where individual creators could develop exclusive places surrounding specific NFTs. While on most social media platforms, the company itself maintains control over individual creators, whether through bans or limiting reach, Rathore wanted to empower creators instead.
Using a process of Token Bound Accounts, Rathore’s team used this standard to enable on-chain community ownership. Once a creator has started a club on Orb, they retain administrative control over it, not Orb or any other entity. Rathore’s next goal was to make this process feel simple and intuitive for creators, not just crypto enthusiasts.
Arguably, Rathore accomplished this goal. Within just a few weeks of launch, over 400 creators applied to start their own clubs. The founder recounts that, minus the crypto jargon, ‘to users, it just felt like creating a group and inviting people.’ The platform grew to host over 200 live clubs with 56,000+ total members across the clubs, generating 60,000+ posts and over $130,000 in creator revenue. Orb became ground zero for countless artists, musicians, and digital creators to build new communities around their work.
Next Up for Nilesh Rathore
Orb continued to grow as an exciting new platform for creativity and crypto to mesh. By early 2025, the platform grew to over 50,000 active users. An acquisition followed shortly after, with Mask Network officially obtaining Orb in May 2025.
The tech founder now turns his attention to AI, and how it, too, might become more consumer-friendly. From food delivery to crypto to AI, for Rathore, the underlying principle must remain the same: “Care about the user experience, build for scale from day one, create real value. The technology changes. The product thinking doesn’t.”
