IIT-H Alumni Award winner 2026 and Start-up founder Pramod Nair walks us through an adrenaline-packed career that includes four successful startups in EdTech, ecommerce, mobile, fintech and logistics with multiple exits across bootstrapped, seed-funded, accelerator-backed, and venture-funded companies, and three consumer apps with over a million downloads.
As delivery partner Rahul completes an order in Indiranagar, he is already on his LoadShare app, choosing from a wide selection of food delivery, quick commerce, ecommerce and ride-hailing aggregators. That is the power of choice and dignity that LoadShare Networks has given the gig worker.
Co-founded by Pramod Nair and Raghuram Talluri, LoadShare has revolutionized intracity cross-vertical last mile logistics, facilitating over a million shipments across 100+ Indian towns and cities. After scaling it to a 1000Cr+ revenue startup within 9 years, their recent UAE and Saudi Arabia launch and nearly $50M in funding from marquee investors like Tiger Global and Matrix Partners has cemented Pramod’s prowess as an impactful innovator and astute entrepreneur.
The Business World 40 Under 40 award in 2025 honoured fifteen-years of stellar contribution, building innovative products for P2P, B2B, B2C and C2C models, overseeing product, engineering, and business teams across edutech, e-commerce, mobile, fintech, logistics, and SaaS-enabled marketplaces. He began his career at D.E. Shaw & Co, and in 2012 he founded his first startup, LearnSocial, a hybrid learning platform. Its acquisition by Way2SMS paved the way for his next innovation the same year. MartMobi, his mobile e-commerce platform, incubated at IIIT-H’s CIE was acquired by Snapdeal. The three consumer apps that he developed – Shopo, TransportBook, and LoadShare Rider touch millions of consumers every day.
“Today is a perfect day to look back”, grins the IIIT-H alumnus, who celebrates his fortieth birthday with a heart-to-heart chat with us.
IIIT Hyderabad — Where it all began
When the school topper joined IIIT Hyderabad, the initial excitement vaporized into culture shock when he realized how smart his peer group was. Keeping up with the rigors that IIIT-H puts you through; assignments, late night submissions and multiple courses was an initial struggle. In his first class at IIIT-H, “Introduction to C”, Prof. Vasudeva Varma pointed out that the programming language could help us put a rocket in space. “That ambitious and out-there thinking, coupled with challenging practical projects encouraged me to be an independent learner”, he reflects.
Very early in college life, he realized that if self-driven, you can have agency in choosing and leveraging the Institute’s resources to get to where you want to be. In his second semester, programming languages learnt were quickly translated into building computer games, distributed among friends under the quirky brand name — GamFactory.
When he approached Dr. Jawahar for guidance on a search engine concept, his professor suggested he could instead contribute to an ongoing million books digitalization project, helmed by Prof. Raj Reddy in collaboration with CMU. As a Research Assistant at CVIT for five semesters, he took on a management role, coordinating multiple deliverables with seniors in LTRC and CVIT, while working on OCR and search engine projects under Dr. Jawahar’s supervision.
He co-authored an international publication on multilingual information retrieval and search, with Vamshi Ambati and Dr. Raj Reddy. “It was much later that I realized the stature of Prof. Raj Reddy and the enormity of this collaboration”, smiles the Dean List-er for two semesters. “I also submitted independent research on search engines at an international conference that led to our discovery by a future co-founder. Looking back, it was the non-traditional path taken at IIIT-H that gave me the confidence to innovate, build and scale startups”.
Charmed entrepreneurial journey
At D. E. Shaw & Co. (2008–2011), Pramod built the firm’s first enterprise data warehouse and investor reporting platform, living inside a hedge fund. Along with building teams in their New York and Hyderabad offices and managing large initiatives, he was concurrently playing entrepreneur over weekends, searching for the next big idea.
His entrepreneurial journey began at twenty-five, with his first startup – Learnsocial.com. It was a peer-to-peer continuous learning platform that connected those interested in upskilling with trainers, teachers and entrepreneurs. It was the world’s first hybrid learning platform, supporting online, physical, and recorded modes of learning. After operating from IIIT-H’s CIE space temporarily, the platform was acquired by Way2SMS within nine months of launch.
MartMobi Acquisition Journey
Following the acquisition, Pramod and his co-founder identified a gap in mobile commerce solutions and decided to explore building a platform to help existing e-commerce businesses expand to mobile devices.
“This time we went through the proper paces of establishing a startup”, he confesses. They reached back to IIIT-H who instantly set them up with a grant and an office. “The early days of MartMobi was great because I was back home at IIIT-H, with access to multiple resources, in expertise, building a tech team and seed funding from HNIs”. What evolved was India’s first startup to be accepted into the TechStars accelerator program in the US. Within two and a half years, they had scaled up, served clients from 24+ countries, gone through a period of acceleration at Chicago and returned for the next funding round.
Snapped up by Snapdeal
When MartMobi was acquired by Snapdeal, the entire team moved to Gurgaon. The app was integrated internally into Shopo, a C2C e-commerce platform for small artisanal buyers and sellers, that had the muscle power of a large company. It soon achieved millions of downloads and a seller base over 200,000. From there, it was a seamless transition to heading Engineering at FreeCharge Bangalore, their technology platform for payment and fulfillment systems.
“For the first time I was working with unlimited resources, building teams at lightning speed and could launch in a new city or set GTM strategies without worrying about making next month’s payroll. That security gave me the bandwidth to innovate and build some of my best work”.
Amidst the vicissitudes of fortune, Pramod kept a steadfast connection with his alma mater. He worked with Dr. Anoop Namboodiri to teach a semester on Scripting in 2014, was a speaker at the 2015 Convocation, a mentor in IIIT-H’s incubation cell and an alumni panel member for the Institute’s 25th anniversary celebrations.
LoadShare rules last mile logistics
When Axis Bank acquired FreeCharge, Pramod was already in talks with his current co-founder Raghuram Talluri. They were looking at the next big jump into the logistics space. The premise was to revolutionize the gig industry, with a platform that would leverage the existing layer of SMEs and gig workers to build India’s largest two-sided logistics marketplace, connecting brands with riders, and fleets that move their goods.
LoadShare Networks was co-founded in 2017. Today, the Series C company is India’s largest logistics marketplace, integrating with major players across e-commerce, quick commerce, food delivery, and bike taxi services, serving 50,000+ active riders through a flexible gig economy model. TransportBook is India’s largest Transport management platform for small truck owners and transporters. The app has revolutionized the trucking industry’s operational and cost efficiency, benefitting over a million registered trucks. Pramod also played a key role in developing the government-backed Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) initiative and had the honour of executing the platform’s first delivery, ordered using LoadShare technology.
Sweet combination of Innovator and Entrepreneur
“Coming from humble beginnings, with my father who worked his entire life in Singareni’s coal mines, I could never have imagined that I would be where I am”. While problem-solving is his passion, he also highlights the challenges faced as a bootstrapped founder, including periods without salary and limited runway. “I moulded myself through my experiences at IIIT-H. I saw what being great looks like and what I could achieve if I didn’t stay stuck to the CGPA rat race. The security that I found at the Institute, the strength derived from my brother, encouraged me to never settle. I actually set out to build my first startup with less than a year’s runway of savings and a home loan to repay. Through all this, my wife, Deepika, an M. Tech and IIIT-H alumna was steadfast in her support”.
Archetypes, humility and due diligence awarded
Sachin Tendulkar and Steve Jobs were childhood archetypes and Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged set the bar for individual excellence. Today, music, thrillers and good Malayalam movies help him to unwind and get back to the grind. Travel and family time with daughters Shailaja and Amulya is their way of making everlasting memories.
“As a founder, you need to stay close to your roots. This helps me serve the market better”, says the entrepreneur who mentors the next generation of entrepreneurs and students through guest lectures at prestigious institutions like IIM-B, IIT Hyderabad, NMIMS. Over the years, he has racked up several prestigious awards including NASSCOM Emerge 50, Aegis Graham Bell Award for Innovation, YourStory Tech30 and the Entrepreneur Extraordinaire by the Startup Leadership Program.
When Pramod joined the Elite BW 40 Under 40 Club last year, it was a glowing tribute to his uncanny ability to keep his ear to the ground. There were times when he would jump on a bike to do deliveries and understand grassroot challenges. On New Year’s Eve last year, when he took his elder daughter Shailaja on a ride-along, it was a beautiful teachable moment. Pramod recalls driving into the innards of a colony, looking for a tiny cloud kitchen, missing the deadline yet making the delivery and getting chastised by the customer. “I persisted because somebody had made the effort to cook the dish and a customer was waiting for his dinner! After building four successful startups, when we envisaged Load Share, we felt the need to swing for the fences, with a generational company that would contribute to India’s economy. The best thing you can do for society is to create real impact and generate employment”, muses the champion of India’s gig economy.
Deepa Shailendra is a freelance writer for interior design publications; an irreverent blogger, consultant editor and author of two coffee table books. A social entrepreneur who believes that we are the harbingers of the transformation and can bring the change to better our world.