He showed up at a bank at 7:30 a.m. with no appointment and left having cut a 45-day payment to 7. Three decades later, the same nerve runs a company the Pentagon trusts with its secrets.
Today Colin Gounden runs VIA, a company in Somerville, Massachusetts that sells something close to a paradox: software that lets organizations share and compute on each other's data without any of them revealing what they hold. Quantum-resistant encryption. Passwordless logins. A zero-trust architecture with product names that sound borrowed from a thriller - GHOST, Quantum Transfer, SLAM AI, VIA Wallet. The customers are not hobbyists. They are roughly twenty of the world's largest utilities and the United States Department of Defense.
In March 2025, Bosch Ventures led a $28M Series B into the company, joined by BMW i Ventures, MassMutual Ventures, Sentinel Global and the existing backer Westly Group. Gounden's framing of the moment was blunt: cyber experts at the Department of Defense and across global enterprise had concluded that decentralized, passwordless, quantum-resistant tools were no longer a luxury but the only viable option. VIA had spent years building for a future most people hadn't priced in yet.
That gap - between what exists and what's evenly distributed - is the through-line of his career. He likes a line from the forecaster Paul Saffo: the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed. Gounden treats it less as a slogan than as a business model. Find the place where the solution already lives, then carry it somewhere it doesn't.
He didn't arrive here in a straight line. Gounden studied biochemistry and molecular biology at Harvard, then quietly stacked computer science courses on the side. He has described his thirty-plus years since as a deliberate switching of lanes: software programmer, private equity partner, drug company board director, IBM employee. The connective tissue isn't an industry. It's a temperament - the willingness to be the only person in the room betting on the unfashionable answer.
In 1996, running an early technology services firm, his team chose internet TCP/IP while customers were demanding Novell and Windows. Peers told them to conform. They didn't. The company - with clients including Royal Dutch/Shell - later sold for roughly $97M to $98M in 1999. The lesson stuck harder than the money: popularity is not proof.
His next act was Grail Research, founded in 2006 with a single employee. By the time he sold it in 2009, it had become a business intelligence and analytics firm with more than 300 full-time people spread across North America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India and China. Along the way he was the first investor and co-founder of five MIT spinouts, two of which turned a profit in their first year, and a partner and elected board director at a top global strategy and private equity firm. Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek and the Financial Times took notice. He still guest-lectures at Harvard Business School.
VIA started in clean energy. Gounden co-founded it in 2016 with Kate Ravanis and steered it into the business of trusted analytics for utilities - the early product was the blockchain-based Trusted Analytics Chain. The mission he repeats is unglamorous and specific: make communities cleaner, safer, and more equitable. The proof is in where the company spends its attention. Instead of chasing the usual coastal tech corridors, VIA invests in markets like Georgia, Oklahoma and Mississippi. The bet is that the most useful technology should show up first in the places that get it last.
The product itself came from listening rather than pitching. In Switzerland, meeting with commercial real estate companies, Gounden learned that tenants flatly refused to share their energy data with the building's owner. No amount of selling would change that. But a tenant might share an answer without sharing the underlying numbers - which is exactly what zero-knowledge proofs allow. The refusal wasn't an objection to overcome. It was the product spec.
That instinct has a name in his vocabulary: inquire more, advocate less. He learned, conversation after conversation, that the higher-impact solution tends to be hiding inside what the customer won't do, not inside what you came to sell. It is an unusual creed for a founder, most of whom are wired to push.
Ask Gounden how he weighs a job and he won't lead with money. He talks about "emotional income" - loving the work - and "learning income" - the pull of a new problem. VIA's stated value is almost defiantly simple: Love in = Love out. He extends the same logic to the unglamorous mechanics of how things actually get done. One of his favorite observations: emails are answered in the order in which someone likes you, not the order in which they were received. Relationships are the real protocol. The rest is overhead.
He credits his co-founder Kate Ravanis as a moral compass, and notes - with evident pride rather than envy - that she is the protagonist of three separate Harvard Business School case studies about VIA's founding. For a man who has sold two companies and sat on multiple boards, it's a telling thing to brag about someone else's case studies, not his own.
Broke and twenty-something, he walked into a bank CIO's office with no appointment, waited him out, got a stalled contract signed, and talked the payment terms down from 45 days to 7. Desperation as negotiation strategy.
A Paris colleague mocked his answer that Ottawa is Canada's capital. He was right; the room was wrong. He filed away a rule that has held up across three decades: consensus is not the same thing as truth.
Tenants told him flat-out they would never hand their energy data to a building owner. Most founders hear an objection. He heard a product spec - and the case for zero-knowledge proofs.
He swapped jokes with an airline check-in agent. Later, his flight canceled, that same agent quietly pulled him aside and put him in first class. Proof, he'd say, that relationships are the real currency.
In 1996, betting on TCP/IP while everyone wanted Novell felt reckless. The company sold for around $98M. The payoff wasn't the price. It was confirmation that being early and alone is survivable.
VIA puts its chips on Georgia, Oklahoma and Mississippi instead of the coasts. The thesis: the most useful technology should arrive first in the places usually served last.
Sources: VIA / solvewithvia.com · Authority Magazine · Crunchbase · TheOrg · public interviews. Facts only where verifiable.