He spent two decades building hundred-million-dollar businesses inside Zillow, Spotify and Google. Then he went to fix the part of the economy that still trades on a handshake.
Ask anyone who has tried to sell a laundromat, a landscaping company, or a 40-year-old machine shop how they found a buyer. The honest answer is usually a name passed across a dinner table. Chat Joglekar watched a relative sell a business that way - through a friend of a friend - and his co-founder Dylan Gans watched his own grandfather wrestle with the same problem. There was no Zillow to open, no comparable sales to scroll, no number anyone trusted. That gap became Baton.
Baton is a marketplace for buying and selling small businesses, and Joglekar runs it as co-founder and CEO from New York. The premise is plain: bring the transparency real estate already enjoys to an asset class that has none. A seller gets a data-backed valuation in about a day, a free listing, the option to stay private, and a 6% commission charged only if the business actually sells. Where traditional brokers can take weeks to produce a number and months to find a buyer, Baton compresses the front end of the deal and puts the data where both sides can see it.
The market underneath that idea is enormous and strangely overlooked. Small business transactions run well past a trillion dollars a year, and Joglekar frames the coming decade as a roughly $10 trillion transfer as baby-boomer owners retire and look for an exit. Most of those owners have spent a lifetime building something with no obvious way to hand it off. Baton's bet is that liquidity and trust, not a shortage of buyers, are what is missing.
If we could bring the same transparency to small business valuations that Zillow brought to real estate, we could get everyone on the same page.
Joglekar did not arrive at Baton as a first-timer. He spent more than five years at Zillow, where he launched and scaled the New Construction marketplace into a business generating north of $100 million in revenue. Before and around that he held senior sales and operations roles at Spotify, at Trulia ahead of its Zillow acquisition, and earlier at Google. The through-line is marketplaces and the unglamorous machinery that makes them work - pricing, supply, the operations that turn a listing into a closed deal.
That resume matters because of who it attracted. When Baton raised its $10 million Series A in January 2025, the round was led by Obvious Ventures and included Spencer Rascoff, the co-founder and former CEO of Zillow himself, investing through his firm 75 & Sunny. Burst Capital, FJ Labs, Fluent Ventures and earlier backers including Bloomberg Beta also joined. The total raised pushed past $15.5 million. The man who built Zillow was now funding the Zillow for small business.
There is a discipline in how Joglekar built the thing. In the early days he did the valuations himself, by hand, reconciling messy financials one business at a time. It is the opposite of the move-fast instinct, and it is deliberate - you learn what to automate only after you have done the work manually enough times to know where the judgment lives. By the time Baton had sold more than 50 businesses, that hands-on apprenticeship had become a product.
For most owners, selling is a once-in-a-lifetime event with a lot of emotion attached. Joglekar tells the story of a seller who used the proceeds from his Baton sale to fund a dream he had carried for years: building an adult day camp in Maine. That, he says, is the part of the job that lands - not the closing, but what the closing makes possible. His favorite life lesson reads the same way.
Life is about the journey, not the destination. The outcome is less important than the impact people have along the way.
The path to all of this is not a straight line. Joglekar trained as an architect, earning a B.A. in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, after attending Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia. The pivot to business came later, with an MBA from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. Somewhere in there he picked up a habit that has nothing to do with spreadsheets: racing cars on track circuits, a passion that family life has mostly parked but not erased.
The ambition behind Baton is bigger than commission on closed deals. Joglekar talks about small business as an asset class that deserves the same plumbing as stocks or real estate, and points to Stripe's mission of growing the GDP of the internet as a model for scale of thinking. His version: lift small business back above 50% of US GDP by making ownership something people can actually buy into, sell out of, and trust the numbers on. It is a long game, which is fitting for someone whose favorite lesson is about the journey.
For now the work is concrete. Double the team. Widen the product. Keep turning the opaque, trillion-dollar Main Street market into something a buyer and a seller can read off the same screen. Zillow did it for the house. Joglekar is wagering the corner business is next.
A relative sold a business through a friend of a friend. Dylan Gans's grandfather struggled to sell his. No marketplace existed. So they built one.
Free to list, private if you want it, a data-backed number in a day, and 6% charged only when the deal actually closes.
Make small business a real asset class - and push it back above 50% of US GDP. Inspiration cited: Zillow and Stripe.
If we could bring the same transparency to small business valuations that Zillow brought to real estate, we could get everyone on the same page.
Life is about the journey, not the destination.
The outcome is less important than the impact people have along the way - the customers helped, employees hired, the lessons learned.
His not-so-secret passion is racing cars on track circuits - mostly parked now by family life.
He trained in architecture at UC Berkeley before ever touching sales ops or software.
Zillow co-founder Spencer Rascoff invested in the startup pitched as the Zillow for small business.