Mohit Garg

Start with the worker who has no laptop

A nurse on a ward. A machinist at a press. A clerk on a retail floor. They share a terminal with a dozen colleagues and clock in maybe ten times a shift. Asking them to memorize a sixteen-character password was always a bad joke, and Mohit Garg built a company around finishing the punchline.

That company is OLOID. It lets frontline staff prove who they are with a face, an RFID badge, an NFC tap or a QR code instead of a string of characters nobody can recall on hour nine of a shift. The pitch is small and stubborn: clocking in should take one second, not one support ticket.

Garg runs it from Sunnyvale as co-founder and CEO, alongside CTO Madhu Madhusudhanan and India GM Shankar Agarwal. The customers are Fortune 500 operators in manufacturing, retail, healthcare and pharmaceuticals - the places where the badge beeps and the work is physical. The company frames its job in a single number it keeps returning to: the 1.8 billion deskless workers worldwide who modern identity software was never built for.

"We focused on deskless workers first because it's an underserved segment where modern identity solutions do not exist."

It is a contrarian place to plant a flag. Identity vendors usually chase the knowledge worker with a corporate laptop and a personal email address. Garg picked the customer most of them skip - the one who often has neither - and treated that absence as the opportunity rather than the obstacle.

The detail that gives the company its name and its texture is the menu of ways a person can prove who they are. A face. An RFID badge already clipped to a uniform. A phone tapped over NFC. A QR code on a screen. Each is a way to answer the same question - is this really you - without forcing a tired worker to type. On a shared device, where the next person in line might be a stranger from a different shift, that question matters more, not less, and the typed password is the weakest possible answer to it.

A second act that rhymes with the first

Look at the two companies side by side and a pattern shows up. Mindtickle was about the people who carry quotas. OLOID is about the people who carry badges. Both bet on a workforce that the prevailing software treated as an afterthought, and both tried to hand that workforce a tool that actually fit the way the job is done.

There is a tidy through-line in the path, too. Mindtickle grew over roughly seven years from an idea into a unicorn, and Garg wore most of the hats a founder can wear along the way - the revenue role facing customers, the product and technology roles facing the build. By the time he started OLOID, he had seen what it takes to carry a company from a deck to a category, and he chose to spend that hard-won experience on a market that almost nobody else wanted to claim.

Garg is an electrical engineer by training, with a master's from Stanford, and the engineer's instinct shows in how OLOID is described - as a platform, a system, a way to replace manual and siloed security with something unified. The work is less about a single clever feature and more about wiring identity into the messy reality of a factory floor or a hospital corridor.

He has also done the connective work that founders do between their own ventures. He advised and sat on the board at Townscript, a go-to-market platform that he helped push to triple-digit-plus top-line growth. Earlier in his career he consulted at Diamond Management and Technology Consultants, the firm later absorbed into PwC.

The recognition followed the second act. In 2024, Thinkers50 placed him on its Leaders50 list, a nod less to a single product than to a way of thinking about who deserves modern tools at work.

The funding tells a measured story rather than a hype cycle. OLOID has raised around $23 million in total, with a $6 million Series A closing in October 2024. For a company chasing a market measured in billions of workers, that is a deliberately early-stage hand, and it frames Garg's current chapter as a build still in motion rather than a victory lap.

The password was built for desks

Think about where the password came from. It was designed for a person who sits at one machine, signs in once in the morning, and stays logged in until they pack up at night. That person has a desk, a chair, and a device that nobody else touches. For them, a password is an annoyance. For everyone else, it is a wall.

Frontline work breaks every one of those assumptions. The device is shared. The sign-ins happen again and again across a shift. Hands are gloved, dirty, or full. There may be no personal email, no company phone, no quiet moment to reset a forgotten credential. Garg's read is that identity software simply never accounted for these people, so they got handed tools meant for someone else and were expected to cope.

OLOID's answer is to meet the worker where they already are. The badge they already wear becomes the key. The face they already have becomes the password. The terminal they already share learns to tell them apart. The friction that used to live in memory moves into hardware and software that does the remembering for them.

Old, manual and siloed security gets a modern and unified alternative. That is the line OLOID keeps coming back to.

It is worth noticing how engineering-shaped that framing is. Garg does not describe a gadget; he describes a platform that ties together the badge readers, the cameras, the phones and the back-end systems so that identity becomes one coherent layer instead of a dozen disconnected workarounds. The instrumentation engineer from Delhi is still, at heart, wiring a system together - only now the system is people clocking in.