Madhu Madhusudhanan

Co-Founder & CTO · Oloid

Workplace identity and access management — passwordless authentication and computer vision for the deskless workforceSan Francisco Bay Area, CA

Madhu Madhusudhanan co-founded OLOID in 2019 with Mohit Garg and Shankar Agarwal and serves as its chief technology officer. OLOID builds passwordless identity and access management for the roughly 1.8 billion deskless workers who share devices and terminals rather than sitting at an assigned computer — factory floors, warehouses, hospitals and shops — using facial recognition, RFID badges, NFC and QR codes in place of passwords. He holds multiple patents in Bluetooth Low Energy based identification and has won innovation awards from HTNEXT, Phocuswright and Next Big Thing.

Last reviewed: Sep 19, 2026

Madhu Madhusudhanan

Co-Founder & CTO Oloid

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Madhu Madhusudhanan is the technical co-founder of OLOID, which he started in 2019 with Mohit Garg and Shankar Agarwal. The company addresses a gap that most enterprise identity vendors have ignored: the roughly 1.8 billion deskless workers who do not have an assigned computer, a corporate email address or a personal login habit. A nurse, a warehouse picker or a line operator authenticates dozens of times a shift on shared terminals and equipment, and password-based identity fails them completely — which is why those environments have historically run on badge swipes, shared PINs and tolerated workarounds. OLOID replaces that with passwordless authentication built for the physical workplace, combining facial recognition, RFID badges, NFC and QR codes with the workforce systems the employer already runs. Madhusudhanan’s own technical speciality is Bluetooth Low Energy identification, where he holds multiple patents and has won innovation awards from HTNEXT, Phocuswright and Next Big Thing.

Career Highlights

  • Co-founded OLOID in 2019 with Mohit Garg, chief executive and previously a co-founder of MindTickle, and Shankar Agarwal; chief technology officer throughout.
  • Holds multiple patents in Bluetooth Low Energy based identification, including technology reported to have exceeded four million downloads.
  • Won innovation awards from HTNEXT, Phocuswright and Next Big Thing.
  • Contributed to $26.4 million raised across three rounds — a $5 million seed alongside the launch of a contactless biometrics platform for deskless workers, a $12 million Series A, and a $6 million Series A1 in October 2024.
  • Built a strategically chosen investor base spanning Dell Technologies Capital, Honeywell Ventures, Okta Ventures, Unusual Ventures, Yaletown Partners, Exposition Ventures, Carya Ventures, the George Kaiser Family Foundation and Emergent Capital.
  • Completed a Workday-certified integration announced with the Series A1, connecting OLOID identity to workforce management.
  • Writes publicly on identity as the prerequisite trust layer for AI adoption in regulated industries.

Professional Journey

Madhusudhanan’s documented technical reputation predates OLOID and rests on Bluetooth Low Energy identification. He holds multiple patents in the field and built BLE technology that was downloaded more than four million times. The awards attached to that work — HTNEXT and Phocuswright, both hospitality and travel technology programmes, along with Next Big Thing — indicate the sector in which he first applied proximity-based identity, though no source consulted names the employer or product, and nothing is asserted here about it.

OLOID was founded in 2019 with Mohit Garg, a second-time founder who had co-founded MindTickle and taken it to unicorn valuation, and Shankar Agarwal. Madhusudhanan took the chief technology officer role. The founding thesis was that enterprise identity had been built entirely for knowledge workers with assigned devices, leaving the deskless majority on manual and siloed systems that were both insecure and slow.

The product built out from contactless biometrics into a broader passwordless platform. Facial recognition is the headline modality, but the architecture is deliberately multi-modal — RFID badges, NFC and QR codes all work, because a single authentication method never survives contact with a real factory, hospital or distribution centre. The technical difficulty lies less in recognition accuracy than in shared-device session management: knowing who is at a terminal now, handing off cleanly, and doing so fast enough that workers do not route around it.

Funding tracked that progression. A $5 million seed launched the contactless biometrics platform, a $12 million Series A followed, and in October 2024 a $6 million Series A1 led by Yaletown Partners, with Exposition Ventures, the George Kaiser Family Foundation and Carya Ventures, brought the total to $26.4 million. The cap table is notably strategic rather than purely financial: Dell Technologies Capital, Honeywell Ventures and Okta Ventures each sit adjacent to the company’s market, in devices, industrial systems and identity respectively. The Series A1 was announced together with a Workday-certified integration, which moved OLOID from standalone authentication toward being part of the workforce management stack.

More recently Madhusudhanan has written about identity as the foundation for AI adoption in regulated settings, arguing in a June 2026 piece that healthcare’s AI ambitions depend on a resilient trust layer beneath them.

Education

Santa Clara University, Leavey School of Business

No degree, field or year of study could be established from any source consulted.