Binu Girija

Founder & CEO Way.com

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Binu Girija is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Way.com, a Fremont, California consumer platform that consolidates the recurring costs of owning a car — parking, insurance, refinancing, fuel, and maintenance — into a single app. He came to the company after roughly a decade as an enterprise architect and ERP specialist at Computer Sciences Corporation, BEA Systems, and Oracle, and after founding several earlier ventures, two of which did not succeed. Way.com grew out of a small irritation with an obvious cause: he had paid roughly three times what he needed to for parking in San Francisco simply because he could not see what the lot down the street charged. The company was co-founded with Bhumi Bhutani and has been built on notably little venture capital.

Career Highlights

• Founder and CEO of Way.com, grown from a parking-space aggregator into a full platform for car ownership spanning insurance, refinancing, fuel, maintenance, and parking.
• Way.com ranked 48th on the World’s Top 100 Marketplaces list in 2022, based on Bloomberg Second Measure consumer transaction data.
• Built the business on roughly $5 million of venture funding raised in 2017, later adding $15.7 million in debt financing from Agnus Capital, Freenix Venture Partners, and Manik Gupta.
• Co-founded the company with Bhumi Bhutani, Co-Founder and VP of Strategic Alliances.
• Former Vice President of Data Analytics and ERP at East West Bank, and an enterprise architect at Oracle, BEA Systems, and Computer Sciences Corporation.
• A founder four times over, including two ventures that failed before Way.com.

Professional Journey

Girija was born in Vilakkupara, in the Kollam district of Kerala, India, to K. Thamarakshan, a civil engineer with the Kerala State Electricity Board, and Baby Girija. He studied computer science and engineering at Bangalore University and entered the IT industry in 1998, beginning with Sabari Finance, a family-owned venture. Through the early 2000s he worked as a software engineer at DSQ Software and UST Global and then as a senior software engineer at Lattice Gulf, before moving into enterprise architecture and ERP work at Computer Sciences Corporation in 2002.

That specialization carried him through a decade of large-systems work: BEA Systems from 2004, Oracle from 2007, and then a move out of pure technology delivery and into a business leadership role as Vice President of Data Analytics and ERP at East West Bank from 2011. Alongside this he had already begun founding companies, establishing Augment Auto Information Systems in India in 2008. By his own account he founded four startups in total, two of which did not work out — experience he has described as formative rather than incidental.

The idea for Way.com arrived on a business trip to San Francisco, when he realized after the fact that he had paid roughly three times as much for parking as he would have at another lot a short walk away. The problem was not price but opacity: there was no way for a driver to see the available options at once. He built Way.com as a transparent marketplace for parking, then extended the same logic outward. If a driver would benefit from comparing parking prices, they would benefit at least as much from comparing the far larger recurring costs of ownership, and the company expanded into car insurance, auto refinancing, fuel and charging, and maintenance scheduling, positioning itself as a consolidated view of what a car actually costs to own.

That expansion turned Way.com into an insurtech and fintech platform rather than a parking app, and it reached 48th place on the World’s Top 100 Marketplaces list in 2022 on Bloomberg Second Measure transaction data. It did so on unusually little outside capital, having raised roughly $5 million in venture funding in 2017 and later taken on $15.7 million in debt financing rather than diluting further. Girija continues to lead the company from Fremont, California, and describes his decision-making as deliberately exposed to dissent, singling out his wife as the most usefully critical reader of his ideas.

Education

Bangalore University

BE, Computer Science and Engineering