Malcolm Dsouza

Co-Founder and CTO Spintly

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Malcolm Dsouza is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Spintly, which builds wireless, cloud-based access control and attendance systems for commercial and residential buildings. The technical premise is a genuine departure from how the industry works: conventional access control requires a controller panel, wiring back to a server, and a credential card, and Spintly replaces that with a distributed IoT architecture running on a wireless mesh, edge computing at the door, and a smartphone as the credential. Dsouza is the person who built that stack. He came to it after roughly fifteen years in Chicago at Motorola and Nokia, working on wireless communications and software-defined radios through successive cellular generations, and he brought standards-body experience with him — he sits in both the Thread Group and the Bluetooth SIG, working on wireless mesh standardisation for exactly the building-automation applications Spintly depends on. The company was founded from a small office in Goa with four employees and has since raised an $8 million Series A led by Accel.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Spintly with Rohin Parkar and serves as Chief Technology Officer.
• Built Spintly’s engineering organisation and its full technology stack from scratch.
• Architected a distributed IoT and edge-computing approach to access control that removes the need for heavy back-end infrastructure and allows smartphone-based door access.
• Spent roughly fifteen years in Chicago at Motorola and Nokia on wireless communications and software-defined radios, with experience spanning 2G through 5G, WiFi and IoT.
• Member of the Thread Group and the Bluetooth SIG, working on wireless mesh adoption and standardisation for access control and building automation.
• Selected for Accel Atoms, Accel’s pre-seed accelerator in India.
• Spintly raised an $8 million Series A led by Accel with Enrission India Capital and SucSEED Ventures, after earlier rounds backed by Accel, Chakra Growth Capital and LetsVenture.
• Speaks across the Indian startup ecosystem, including eChai Ventures events, on wireless technology and building a hardware company outside the major startup hubs.

Professional Journey

Dsouza studied electrical, electronics and communications engineering at Goa College of Engineering and then left India for the United States, where he spent roughly fifteen years in Chicago. His work there was at the deep end of wireless: software-defined radio and cellular communications at Motorola and Nokia, across the transitions from 2G through to 5G, alongside WiFi and the emerging IoT protocol stack. That is an unusual foundation for a physical-security founder, and it explains the shape of the company he later built — Spintly’s differentiation is radio and mesh networking, not locks.

He returned to India and co-founded Spintly with Rohin Parkar, starting in a small office in Goa with four employees. Goa is not a conventional location for a deep-tech hardware startup; the Indian ecosystem is concentrated in Bengaluru, the NCR and Mumbai, and choosing otherwise meant building an engineering team locally rather than hiring from an established pool. The legal vehicle, Mrinq Technologies LLP, was registered with the Registrar of Companies in Goa in September 2017, with the product reaching market the following year.

Dsouza’s remit has been the technology stack and the team that builds it. The architecture he designed distributes intelligence to the edge — each door device is capable enough to make access decisions locally and to participate in a wireless mesh — which removes the back-end controller hardware and structured cabling that dominate the cost of a conventional installation. The user-facing consequence is that a smartphone becomes the credential, and the commercial consequence is that a retrofit is viable in buildings where running new cable is not. His standards-body work runs alongside this: membership of the Thread Group and the Bluetooth SIG puts him inside the processes that determine whether wireless mesh becomes a credible foundation for building automation at all, rather than merely arguing for it from outside.

Investors have followed. Spintly was selected for Accel Atoms, Accel’s pre-seed programme in India, and went on through seed and pre-Series A rounds backed by Accel, Chakra Growth Capital and LetsVenture to an $8 million Series A led by Accel, with Enrission India Capital and SucSEED Ventures participating, raised to fund international expansion. Dsouza speaks regularly across the Indian startup ecosystem, including at eChai Ventures events, both about the technology and about the practicalities of building a hardware company from a small state.

Education

Goa College of Engineering

Bachelor of Engineering, Electrical, Electronics and Communications Engineering