Two weeks into Y Combinator, Mrinal Singh and his co-founders had an awkward problem. They had already left well-paid jobs. They had been accepted into the accelerator with a suggestion to change direction. They had tried that change. It had failed. Admission to the club had arrived before a convincing reason for the company to exist.
Singh later described the response in remarkably ordinary terms. He, Jake Johnson and Milan Bhandari picked up the phone. They called people repeatedly, looking for a problem, then tried selling a solution. Months later, they presented Bolto to YC partner Dalton Caldwell. His verdict was brief: “This makes sense.” For a founder, three words can do more work than a handsome slide deck.
Today Singh is the co-founder and CEO of Bolto, the company that connects recruiting, payroll and HR. He also uses the name Mern on his public profiles. His career includes Dartmouth College and Lazard Frères & Co., institutions that make a résumé look reassuring. Yet his public advice about hiring asks employers to look beyond reassuring résumés. The interesting part of his story is how often he returns to the work behind the credentials.
A Cincinnati student with several possible futures
Before the recruiting software, there was a student interested in law and business. Singh was a Dartmouth student from Cincinnati, Ohio, and graduated from Indian Hill High School in 2017. His school’s alumni publication later recorded his work at Bolto. It is a small hometown entry in a career that now involves companies hiring across borders.
At Dartmouth, his 2018 student biography described plans to study economics and philosophy and eventually attend law school. He was a senior editor at the Dartmouth Law Journal, a Student Assembly senator, involved in research, and a participant in Dartmouth’s Investing and Philanthropy Program. These were interests and plans at the time, rather than a prophecy of the career that followed.
He graduated with an AB and worked at Lazard. The move into entrepreneurship came later. There is no need to make the earlier ambitions look like a detour: law, business, investing and campus representation were already different ways of examining how decisions get made. Bolto would give him a much more immediate setting in which to make them.
The student who questioned his own story
One piece of Singh’s college writing is particularly revealing. In a 2018 reflection, he considered the balance between facts and emotional appeal in a narrative. Too little feeling could leave a paper lifeless. Too much could distort the reader’s understanding. He examined his own drafts, including a portrayal of Pablo Escobar that he felt had become unevenly sympathetic.
The striking detail is his willingness to identify a flaw in his own presentation. He had chosen language that pushed the reader toward a view he had not intended to endorse. Revision meant reconsidering the effect of those choices, rather than simply improving the sentences. A good story required more than knowing how to hold attention.
That essay belongs to his student years. It does not explain every later business decision. Still, it offers an unusually useful glimpse of Singh before his founder announcements: a writer checking whether the account he had constructed was doing justice to the material. Years later, an unsuccessful idea would demand a different kind of revision, this time with customers on the other end of a telephone.
“This makes sense.”Dalton Caldwell, as recalled by Singh
The phone became the research department
Bolto was founded in 2023 and joined Y Combinator’s Summer 2023 batch. The early team combined different professional backgrounds: Singh had worked in investment banking, Johnson had been a Microsoft product manager, and Bhandari brought experience in AI and machine learning. Their previous jobs were useful history. They still had to discover something people wanted to buy.
Singh’s account of the failed pivot is appealing because it leaves the difficulty intact. Acceptance into an accelerator did not settle the question of what to build. A new direction did not automatically improve on the old one. The founders’ response required conversations and attempts to sell, with the possibility that each conversation would fail to produce the desired answer.
The telephone is an unfashionable object in an AI company’s origin story. It offers no automatic applause and very little room to hide behind a product demonstration. In this case, it helped the founders keep looking. Their eventual business would concern other companies’ ability to assemble teams, an undertaking where understanding another person’s problem is a substantial part of the job.
A hire has a second chapter
In its March 2025 seed announcement, Bolto described a fragmented process. Employers found candidates through recruiters, then arranged the systems needed to pay and manage them. Singh and his colleagues proposed bringing those jobs together. Their candidate assessment approach included résumés, LinkedIn profiles, GitHub contributions, online portfolios and interviews, with AI used in the process.
The business also included payroll and HR services. For a founder buying the product, the attraction was practical: the recruitment decision and the administration that followed could happen in the same place. The initial hire would cease to be the point at which the customer had to go shopping for another collection of tools.
By the following year, Singh explained that customers had asked whether they could also pay the people recruited through Bolto. He presented that question as a reason for expanding the company’s scope. Recruiting led to payroll, and payroll led into the wider business of managing a workforce. A customer asking for the next step had helped define the next product.
The month with seven people and a million-dollar pipeline
On March 5, 2025, Bolto announced a $5.1 million seed round with backing from Y Combinator, General Catalyst and other investors. Singh’s announcement named early customers including Fiber AI, Assembly, Pareto.AI and Rebet. It also thanked the people doing the work inside the company. The customer names and team names made the financial announcement rather less abstract.
His recap of March reported 40 percent month-over-month revenue growth and more than $1 million in sales pipeline. Pipeline is prospective business, so that figure should be read separately from revenue. He also reported that the funding launch generated more than 400,000 impressions across LinkedIn and Twitter, and that inbound leads exceeded the previous weekly record by more than twelvefold.
The same recap contained a detail more useful than the social numbers: the team had reached seven full-time members, including someone originally hired as a contractor through Bolto itself. Two engineers had joined, and the team met in San Francisco. The company was using its own hiring platform while asking customers to trust it with their hiring. That is a rather direct form of product feedback.
Including a contractor hired through Bolto’s platform.
The impossible candidate can stay imaginary
Singh’s frustration with hiring checklists is specific. He has described employers wanting an engineer who attended Harvard or MIT, worked at a venture-backed startup, had a tightly prescribed amount of experience, and won international mathematics competitions in high school. By the time the conditions have been assembled, the job description begins to resemble a missing-person notice for someone who may never have existed.
His preferred approach gives more weight to a candidate’s upward trajectory. In his words, “slope matters more than the Y-intercept.” The mathematical image is useful: where someone starts and how quickly they develop are different questions. He wants employers to consider people who can grow into a role, rather than hold out for an elaborate combination of credentials.
He makes a related point when describing Bolto’s own interviews. Evidence of shipping something, working without constant direction, handling a customer conversation and improving the team comes ahead of titles or pedigree. Those are demanding criteria. They simply demand proof in a different form. A side project can become part of the conversation; a polished employment history still has to answer what the person actually did.
“slope matters more than the Y-intercept.”Mrinal Singh on hiring for growth
People behind the product
Singh’s hiring announcements show what that approach can look like in an individual case. When McKenna Robinette joined as Bolto’s first customer success manager, he emphasized her combination of customer success and technical recruiting experience. He also described how she handled the interview cases. The fit concerned both the job’s requirements and the way she approached problems.
The current team includes Mary Landis as CTO and Owen Oktay as COO, alongside recruiting, design, engineering and customer-facing colleagues. Bolto’s public team photographs show the company away from its product screens as well. The business sells a connected employee lifecycle; its own website gives that lifecycle faces.
Singh has also served on Teach For America’s associate board, from July 2021 to June 2024. His listed languages include Hindi, English, Spanish and elementary Italian. These are distinct parts of his public record, alongside the founder role. They help widen a portrait that could otherwise consist entirely of financing rounds and software releases.
A larger company, and the small matter of getting paid
On April 21, 2026, Singh announced Bolto’s $12 million Series A, led by Standard Capital. The company put total funding at $17.1 million and reported more than twentyfold revenue growth since its seed round. Funding buys time and capacity; revenue growth indicates that more business is reaching the product. Neither figure, by itself, tells the full story of what the team must deliver next.
On October 1, Bolto introduced Instant Pay, advertising same-day and next-day payouts in more than 190 countries. The announcement framed delayed, opaque payments as a problem for the relationship between worker and employer. For a company that began with recruiting, the development follows the employee farther into the working week: being hired is followed by doing the job, and doing the job is followed by expecting the money to arrive.
Away from that work, Singh describes himself as a lifelong tennis player, reader, traveler, language learner and culinary enthusiast. His personal site calls out an interest in people and hard problems. The modest wording suits a story whose decisive early action was calling people and listening. His résumé records where he has been. The company he is building keeps asking what should happen next.