Karl Mehta

Chairman of the Board ZetaGig

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Karl Mehta is a serial technology entrepreneur whose career has alternated between building companies, investing in them and working inside government. He founded PlaySpan, a micro-transaction and virtual currency platform that Visa bought in March 2011 for around $240 million, and EdCast, an enterprise learning network acquired by Cornerstone OnDemand in 2022. Between and alongside those he served in the inaugural class of White House Presidential Innovation Fellows under the Obama administration, sat on the California Workforce Investment Board at Governor Jerry Brown’s appointment, held a venture partnership at Menlo Ventures, and founded Code for India, a non-profit channelling Silicon Valley engineering time into development work. Since November 2025 he has chaired the board of ZetaGig, a Florida-based pre-IPO semiconductor company designing ASIC chips for Bitcoin mining and AI computing. He started from a considerably harder position than most of his peers: his father died when he was in the tenth grade, and he paid for six years of engineering education in Bombay by selling gadgets and tutoring.

Career Highlights

• Founded PlaySpan and sold it to Visa in March 2011 for approximately $240 million.
• Founded EdCast and led it as chief executive to acquisition by Cornerstone OnDemand in 2022.
• Selected as a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow in the programme’s inaugural 2012-13 cohort.
• Appointed to the California Workforce Investment Board by Governor Jerry Brown.
• Venture Partner at Menlo Ventures from 2013.
• Founded Code for India, a Silicon Valley non-profit recognised by both Narendra Modi and Sundar Pichai.
• Named Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for Northern California.
• Named a Top 50 CEO for Diversity by USA Today and Comparably while leading EdCast.
• Appointed Chairman of the Board of ZetaGig in November 2025.

Professional Journey

Mehta’s early life is not incidental to his career, because the thing he has spent most of his working life on — access to capability for people who do not have it — is recognisably drawn from it. He grew up in Bombay, and when his father, the family’s only earner, died while Mehta was in the tenth grade, the cost of the six years of education still ahead of him became his own problem. He paid for it by selling gadgets and tutoring, and graduated from the University of Bombay with a degree in electronics engineering. Getting to the United States was similarly not straightforward: he was refused a US visa three times, and eventually arrived by way of Singapore, which is where his working life in technology began.

PlaySpan was his third startup and the first to produce a major exit. It solved the payments problem for games and virtual goods — micro-transactions at a scale and unit economics that conventional card processing handled badly, with a virtual currency layer that predated Bitcoin’s arrival in the mainstream by some years. That combination made it strategically valuable to the incumbent payments industry rather than merely profitable, and in March 2011 Visa acquired it for approximately $240 million.

What followed the exit was not another company immediately but a period in public service and investing, and this is the most distinctive stretch of his career. In 2012 he was selected for the inaugural cohort of White House Presidential Innovation Fellows, a programme that placed technologists inside federal agencies for fixed terms to work on specific problems. Governor Jerry Brown appointed him to the California Workforce Investment Board, putting him on the policy side of the skills and employment question. In 2013 he joined Menlo Ventures as a venture partner. He also founded Code for India, a Silicon Valley non-profit built on the premise that the binding constraint on development technology is not money but engineering time, and that engineers would volunteer it if there were a structure to do so; the organisation has been publicly recognised by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and by Google chief executive Sundar Pichai. In the same period he wrote a book on financial inclusion for the world’s poorest consumers.

EdCast, founded around 2013, brought those threads together commercially. It was a knowledge network rather than a course catalogue — built on a many-to-many model where expertise inside an organisation surfaces and circulates, rather than the instructor-led, top-down structure of conventional corporate learning management systems. The customers were enterprises, governments, institutions and non-profits, which is a wider spread than most learning vendors attempt and reflects the same access-to-capability thesis. He led it as chief executive for roughly nine years, and during that period was named a Top 50 CEO for Diversity by USA Today and Comparably. In 2022 Cornerstone OnDemand, backed by Clearlake Capital, completed its acquisition of EdCast, and it became a Cornerstone business unit. Mehta has since departed; profiles still describing him as running “EdCast by Cornerstone” are out of date.

His current role is a board seat rather than an operating one. In November 2025 ZetaGig appointed him chairman of the board. ZetaGig, founded in 2022 and based in Florida, is a pre-IPO semiconductor company whose product is ASIC silicon — application-specific chips designed to outperform competitors on efficiency for Bitcoin mining, with AI computing as the adjacent market. Its founder and chief executive Sandeep Gupta framed the appointment in terms of execution credibility, saying Mehta’s leadership and experience in technology innovation and business execution would strengthen the company’s position. The company is raising equity financing and states targets of profitability within sixteen months and a valuation above $10 billion by 2028 — its own projections, made while fundraising, rather than independent assessments. For Mehta the seat fits a pattern: he has repeatedly attached himself to infrastructure plays at the point where a technical advantage still has to be converted into a market.

Education

University of Bombay

Bachelor’s, Electronics Engineering