Rohin Parkar

Co-Founder & CEO Spintly

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Rohin Parkar is co-founder and chief executive of Spintly, a Goa-based company that builds wireless access control for buildings. Conventional access control is a wiring problem as much as a software one: every door needs a cable run back to a controller, and every user needs a plastic credential. Spintly’s platform replaces that with Bluetooth mesh hardware at the door, cloud management, and a smartphone as the credential, which removes both the structured cabling and the badge inventory. The company extends the same platform into visitor management, tenant management and time-and-attendance. Parkar spent close to two decades in wireless silicon and product development in the United States — cellular basebands, WiFi reference designs and IoT radio work — before returning to the town he grew up in to start the company with a childhood friend.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Spintly with Malcolm Dsouza, who serves as chief technology officer, and leads the business, sales, fundraising and marketing side of the company.
• Spintly reports more than 300 customers and over 4,000 doors deployed, with early enterprise customers including MyGate, Smartworks, FF21 and L&T Realty.
• The company is listed in Accel’s Atoms portfolio and raised a $100,000 pre-seed in March 2019 and a $250,000 seed in March 2020 from Saltwater Venture Sparks and angel investors.
• Served as a Senior Staff Engineer at Broadcom, designing compact WiFi reference designs aimed at the IoT market.
• Worked as a Principal Hardware Engineer at RF DSP Inc. on technology for next-generation 5G cellular base stations.
• Sits on the Thread Group and the Bluetooth SIG, contributing to wireless mesh standardisation — the standards layer the company’s own product depends on.

Professional Journey

Parkar trained as an electronics and telecommunications engineer at Goa College of Engineering, graduating in 2001, and built his early career in the United States around radio. The span of that work is unusually wide for one engineer: 2G through 5G cellular, WiFi, and the low-power mesh protocols that became the IoT stack. At RF DSP Inc. he was a principal hardware engineer working on next-generation 5G base-station technology. At Broadcom, as a senior staff engineer, he designed compact WiFi reference designs targeted at IoT device makers — the kind of work that puts an engineer in direct contact with the constraints that later define a product company, since a reference design is judged on how cheaply and reliably someone else can build it into a shipping device. He added an MBA from the University of Texas at Dallas along the way.

Spintly began as a conversation between two people who had both left Goa. Parkar and Malcolm Dsouza were childhood friends, both by then living in the United States, who had talked for years about building something back in their hometown. Sources differ on when they actually did it: StartupTalky dates the company’s founding to 2017, while Accel’s Atoms portfolio listing gives 2018.

The technical bet was that the access-control industry’s cost structure was mostly cabling and installation labour, not electronics. A wireless mesh at the door, managed from the cloud, collapses that cost — and it makes retrofit viable in buildings where running new cable is impractical. The company frames the result in physical terms, claiming to have displaced roughly 200,000 plastic badges and around 2,000 miles of wired infrastructure across its deployments. Commercially it grew through Indian commercial real estate and coworking: MyGate, Smartworks, FF21 and L&T Realty were among the early customers. Funding has been modest and staged — a $100,000 pre-seed from angels in March 2019 and a $250,000 seed round in March 2020 led by Saltwater Venture Sparks — and the company is carried in Accel’s Atoms portfolio.

Within the company Parkar runs the commercial side: business, sales, fundraising and marketing, with Dsouza holding the technology. His standards work at the Thread Group and the Bluetooth SIG sits somewhere between the two, since Spintly’s product depends on the same wireless mesh specifications he helps shape.

Education

Goa College of Engineering

Bachelor of Engineering, Electronics and Telecommunication, 2001

University of Texas at Dallas

Master of Business Administration