Raghav
Gulati

Before CoinList was synonymous with vetted token launches, before Solana was a household name in crypto, Raghav Gulati was a mathematics graduate from the University of Georgia writing software for a startup called Insightpool, serving as its CTO somewhere in Atlanta. The straightest line from there to crypto CEO is not a line at all - it's a series of bets that happened to land.

He came through the school of build-it-yourself. Backplane. Shyp. Keep Network. SHA Capital. Each stop a different angle on the same question: what does infrastructure for the next financial system actually look like? By the time he arrived at CoinList - first as President, then stepping up to CEO - the question had clarified. And so had the answer.

CoinList's core proposition sounds simple: a regulated launchpad connecting serious crypto projects with serious investors. In execution it was anything but. The platform navigated SEC scrutiny, custody complexity, KYC/AML requirements, and the perpetual chaos of crypto market cycles - all while processing some of the industry's most consequential token sales. Solana's early raise ran through CoinList. The track record speaks before he has to.

At the Solana Accelerate 2025 conference, Gulati did not show up with a pitch deck. He showed up with a thesis. Solana is the decentralized NASDAQ - subsecond settlement, one-cent transactions, financial infrastructure that finally matches what capital markets require. He invited founders tired of regulatory uncertainty to "come talk to us." The audience knew he meant it.

In January 2025, CoinList announced a partnership with AngelList to launch crypto special purpose vehicles (SPVs) and roll-up vehicles (RUVs). The mechanism: investors fund in USDC, receive tokens once they're available. No bank transfer friction. No cash return that misses the point of being in crypto. Gulati explained the logic to TechCrunch without overselling it - "aligned with the crypto ethos of stakeholder participation and self-ownership of assets" - which is about as close to a manifesto as he gets in public.

By November 2025, the evolution continued. CoinList announced it was going fully non-custodial, integrating Privy's wallet infrastructure so users receive token distributions directly into wallets they control. Custodial crypto is a contradiction in terms, the reasoning goes. The market had moved. Gulati moved with it - or ahead of it. Hard to tell from the outside.

The transition to Partner at Ravikant Capital marks a different kind of bet. Ravikant Capital plays in early-stage crypto and blockchain investments. Gulati brings an operator's eye to the table: he knows what a legitimate project looks like at close range, what infrastructure actually needs to exist before a token launch can go smoothly, and where the bodies are buried in crypto fundraising. That institutional knowledge is the real asset.

His self-description on about.me - written years before any of this, when he was still figuring it out in Atlanta - reads: "San Francisco transplant, hacker, wanderer." The titles have changed. The disposition hasn't. He's still doing math on systems that don't exist yet.