Rakesh Sharrma

Founder & CEO Mobilous

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Rakesh Sharrma founded Mobilous in Gurugram in 2010 and leads it as chief executive. The company’s product, AppEXE, is a zero-code development platform: a drag-and-drop design surface that compiles out genuinely native iOS and Android binaries — .ipa and .apk files — as well as a web target, rather than wrapping a web view in a shell as hybrid frameworks do. That distinction is the company’s central technical claim and the basis of its patents, which were granted in Japan, the United States and India; Mobilous describes the Japanese grant as the first of its kind to an Indian IT company. Sharrma is on his third venture. He began in sales at Tata Steel, became chief operating officer of eCircle Technologies, co-founded Opelin, and spent three years at HP running cloud services and mobile printing after HP acquired it.

Career Highlights

• Founder and chief executive of Mobilous, founded 2010 in Gurugram, developer of the AppEXE zero-code mobile application platform.
• Patents granted for AppEXE in Japan, the United States and India, with the Japanese grant described by the company as the first to an Indian IT company for zero-programming native app-building technology.
• Eight technology patents in total by his own account.
• Raised $2.93 million for Mobilous across a March 2014 seed round and a June 2017 Series A, with CreedCap Asia Advisors participating.
• Director of Cloud Services and Mobile Printing at HP from 2008 to 2011, building the mobile printing capability he describes as the origin of HP’s print-as-a-service business.
• Co-founder of Opelin, which he says HP acquired, and chief operating officer of eCircle Technologies, acquired by Reliance in 2003.
• Began his career at Tata Steel as an area sales manager in 1998.

Professional Journey

Sharrma trained as an electrical and electronics engineer and took an MBA before entering industry. He started at Tata Steel in 1998 as an area sales manager — a conventional Indian corporate beginning that he left in his early thirties for the startup side.

From 2000 he was chief operating officer of eCircle Technologies. The company was acquired by Reliance in 2003, his first exit, though as an operator rather than as a founder. He then co-founded Opelin, his second venture and his first as a founder. Opelin was acquired by HP, and Sharrma moved across with it, serving from 2008 to 2011 as Director of Cloud Services and Mobile Printing. His account of that period is that he built the mobile printing capability that became HP’s print-as-a-service offering. It is worth noting that no HP announcement or trade coverage of the Opelin acquisition could be located; the acquisition is attested only by Sharrma himself.

Mobilous, his third venture, was founded in 2010, overlapping the end of his HP tenure, in partnership with a co-founder from Akira, an HP partner in Japan — which explains the company’s unusually strong Japanese orientation and why its flagship patent was granted there. The product thesis was that enterprise mobile app development was bottlenecked by scarce native developers, and that a drag-and-drop tool which emitted real native binaries rather than hybrid wrappers could collapse both the cost and the timeline. The company claims reductions of roughly 60% in development time and 50% in cost, with app sizes 30 to 50 MB smaller than hybrid equivalents. Those figures, and the description of its customers as spanning manufacturing, retail, logistics and financial services, come from a company-supplied vendor profile rather than from independent measurement.

The company raised modestly — a seed round in March 2014 and a Series A in June 2017, $2.93 million in total. Its scale should be understood accordingly: company-register data shows three employees as of August 2025 and annual revenue under ₹10 crore for the year to March 2025, and the corporate website’s security certificate had lapsed by September 2026. In the same profile in which he set out his ambitions for the platform, Sharrma said he expected to exit Mobilous within three years, after which he intended to invest in space and defence, and to mentor other founders.

Education

Birla Institute of Technology

Bachelor’s degree, Electrical and Electronics Engineering

XLRI — Xavier School of Management

MBA