Dipti Desai

The story does not begin in a garage or an accelerator. It begins in 2020, in the middle of a pandemic, when Desai volunteered to help a nonprofit sell masks and other PPE online. Her assignment was narrow: build a digital storefront so people could buy supplies without leaving home. What she got instead was an education in everything broken about commerce behind the checkout button.

As a seller, she ran into a wall of opacity. No data transparency. No consistency in what information was available. Almost no visibility into where supplies actually were in the supply chain. She had spent a career building data products at scale, and here was a corner of the economy operating on guesswork and email attachments. The more she dug, the more she found the same culprit underneath: EDI, ubiquitous and ancient, the standard every big retailer demanded and almost no modern software served well.

That gap became founder-market fit. In 2021 she co-founded Crstl with Suparna Gharpure, the company's engineering lead, to drag B2B commerce into the present. The pandemic side project had quietly become a thesis: democratize data access, and the rest of commerce gets easier.

Desai's resume reads like a deliberate march toward this problem, even if it did not feel that way at the time. She earned an electrical engineering degree from Virginia Tech and then a master's in public policy with a technology focus from UC Berkeley - hardware on one side, the governance of technology on the other. It is an unusual pairing, and it shows in how she talks about commerce: part systems engineer, part person who thinks about who gets access to what.

She became a Silicon Valley veteran the hard way, taking product and engineering leadership roles at growth-stage startups across adtech, logistics, and SaaS. Then came Uber, where she was a founding member of the Product & Tech Strategy team and a product lead for the data platform. She oversaw a suite of more than eight data products, managed a team of around 40 engineers, and helped launch a data platform that supported the rides marketplace - the kind of infrastructure work that is invisible when it works and catastrophic when it does not.

That Uber chapter is the through-line. Marketplaces, data products, the discipline of building systems that thousands of other people quietly rely on - it is the same shape as the problem she chose to spend the next decade on. She just swapped riders and drivers for brands and retailers.

The cap table tells you who takes the problem seriously. Crstl's backers include Target - the retailer - alongside Shopify Ventures, Cohen Circle, Mosaic General Partnership, and Village Global. When the company you build helps brands sell into retail, having a major retailer and the dominant commerce platform both writing checks is less a coincidence than a signal. The 2025 Series A, led by Mosaic General Partnership and Cohen Circle with Shopify Ventures, pushed total funding past $10 million and is earmarked for expanding Crstl's AI-native automation.

To understand Crstl you have to sit with how strange the status quo is. A modern brand can spin up a beautiful direct-to-consumer store in an afternoon. Stripe takes the payment, Shopify renders the storefront, a dozen apps handle email and reviews and shipping labels. The whole experience is designed for a person who has never written a line of code. Then that same brand lands its first big retail account - a Target, a grocery chain, a national distributor - and falls off a cliff into a world that time forgot.

On the other side of that account is EDI, a standard born in the 1970s and 80s for trading documents between computers: purchase orders, advance ship notices, invoices, all formatted in a way that made sense when storage was expensive and bandwidth was a luxury. Retailers mandate it. Suppliers comply or they do not get on the shelf. The catch is that the existing tooling was built for engineers and enterprise IT departments, priced for enterprise budgets, and stitched together with a fragility that nobody outside the field appreciates. A misplaced character in a label can mean a rejected shipment and a chargeback.

That is the gap Desai walked into during the pandemic, and it is the gap Crstl is built to close. The company's pitch is not that EDI should disappear - it cannot, it is the lingua franca of physical commerce - but that the human standing in front of it should not need a computer science degree. Crstl wraps the protocol in software that operators can actually use: no-code setup, retailer onboarding, vendor compliance, GS1-128 labeling, and order fulfillment automation, increasingly stitched together with AI workflows. The thesis is almost mundane in its ambition: make the boring layer trustworthy, and a whole class of brands can grow into channels that were previously gated behind engineering teams.

Desai did not build Crstl alone, and she is quick to name the partnership. Her co-founder, Suparna Gharpure, leads engineering - the technical counterweight to Desai's product-and-strategy background. Around them the company has assembled a commercial and operations bench, including business operations and a commercial leadership team, the kind of structure that signals a company past the prototype stage and into the grind of selling to brands and retailers.

That word - grind - is one Desai returns to. She is unusually candid about the unglamorous reality of building a company, describing it as "a lot of grinding away in obscurity while facing numerous obstacles every day." It is a striking thing for a CEO to say out loud in an era of founder mythology. Her advice to would-be founders carries the same skepticism of the highlight reel: do not do it if you thrive on external validation, she warns, and instead make sure you are rooted in internal validation while solving a problem that genuinely motivates you. Coming from someone who spent years building infrastructure nobody sees, it does not read as a pose. It reads as someone describing the actual job.

What she is aiming at is bigger than any single feature. Crstl's stated mission is to democratize data access and become the modern B2B commerce network - a world, in the company's own framing, where every connection between brands, retailers, and logistics providers is intuitive, efficient, and scalable. The lines between selling to consumers and selling to businesses are blurring, and Desai's argument is that the infrastructure underneath has to get smarter to keep up. She is betting that the company who makes the unsexy middle of commerce feel modern will end up owning a surprising amount of it.