For twenty years he watched engineering teams rebuild the same login screens and chat windows. In 2017 he stopped complaining about it and started Onymos - a bet that software features should be rented, not rebuilt.
There is a version of a software career that nobody puts on a slide at a startup pitch. It is the part where you build the login screen. Again. And the chat window. Again. And the push notifications, the payment flow, the file upload - all of it, from scratch, in yet another codebase, for yet another product that a customer will never thank you for. Shiva Nathan lived that version for two decades before he decided it did not have to exist.
Nathan spent more than twenty years inside the machinery of large software companies - Oracle, CA, and finally Intuit, where he ran the Platform and Services organization. That job put him in charge of the cloud plumbing behind products millions of people use without thinking: TurboTax, QuickBooks, the tools that quietly move money and taxes around every spring. It was a serious role at a serious company. And it gave him a clear, close-up view of the same waste happening everywhere he looked.
The observation that eventually became a company was almost embarrassingly simple. Engineering teams, he noticed, were all building the same thing.
If you have never written software, it is worth sitting with how strange this is. Imagine every restaurant in a city forging its own forks. Every airline machining its own jet engines from raw metal. That is roughly what modern software does with its most basic features - each team rebuilds the standard parts, then spends years maintaining them. Nathan did not just find this inefficient. He found it personally deadening.
The phrase Nathan uses for the moment the idea clicked is not dramatic. It is four words, and they are the four words behind almost every company worth remembering: there had to be a better way. In 2017 he left the safety of Intuit's platform org and started Onymos in Palo Alto to go build it.
The pitch he landed on is called Features-as-a-Service, or FaaS. The idea: instead of rebuilding login, payments, notifications, location, cloud sync and a couple dozen other standard features, a company drops in ready-made ones and gets back the months it would have burned. Onymos says it packs more than twenty of these foundational features into its platform, cutting development cycles from months to weeks.
But the part that makes Onymos more than a convenience store for code is a design decision most vendors would never make on purpose. Your data does not pass through Onymos. You get the feature; you keep the information. In an industry where the default business model is to sit in the middle of a customer's data and quietly monetize the view, Nathan built a wall instead.
Fundraising is where founders usually learn to say what money wants to hear. Nathan did something odd: he told the people writing checks exactly where they ranked. Employees first. Customers second. Investors third. Out loud. To the investors.
It reads like a stunt until you notice he still closed a Series A. The order was not a negotiating tactic - it was a description of how he actually intended to run the place, and, it turns out, a certain kind of investor respects a founder who is not performing.
Not everything went to plan, and he does not pretend it did. Early on, a major enterprise deal collapsed after months of work - not because the product failed, but because the client reorganized internally and the whole thing evaporated. It is the kind of loss that ends a lot of young companies, or at least the founder's nerve. Nathan's response was to treat the deal as incidental and the mission as the point. The goal was never that one contract. It was ending the wasted engineering effort he had spent a career watching.
That line came from another bruise. While bootstrapping, he tried to bring on an expensive web design firm - a partnership that fit the company he wanted to be, not the company he actually was yet. The fit was wrong. He kept the lesson.
Ask Nathan how he thinks about pace and he passes along advice from his mentor, the investor Ashmeet Sidana: build a company at near-sprint speed, but over a marathon distance, and when the road gets dark, keep your eyes on the horizon rather than your feet. It is a useful way to read the arc of Onymos, because the company did not stay put.
What started as a way to stop rebuilding mobile app features grew teeth in a harder arena. Onymos now runs a platform called DocKnow that reads and structures complex documents for healthcare and life sciences - laboratory accessioning, revenue cycle work, patient intake, the unglamorous paperwork that hospitals drown in. In 2026 the company announced a collaboration with Mayo Clinic to fold DocKnow into the institution's digital infrastructure, interpreting clinical information and handing back structured output for human review.
The application changed - from app plumbing to clinical documents - but the throughline did not. Take the hard, repetitive work off a team's plate. Keep the customer in control of their own data. That second principle, the one that felt like a quirky design choice in the mobile days, becomes the entire reason a hospital will take the meeting.
Nathan's resume has the polish you would expect - a computer engineering degree with honors from BITS Pilani in India, an MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, a run through some of the most respected platform teams in the Valley. In 2024 the Mobile Breakthrough Awards named him CEO of the Year, which is a nice line for a company of roughly two dozen people going up against far larger vendors.
But the thing that actually explains him is smaller and less flattering to put on a slide: he got bored. He noticed the boring part of the job, took it seriously instead of tuning it out, and built a company on the theory that everyone else's boredom was a market. Vision is cheap in startups. Noticing the dull, repeated thing that everyone has agreed to ignore - and refusing to ignore it - is the rarer move.
He talks, occasionally, about bigger things than software - about wanting a more collaborative world that reaches past the old nation-state model. It is a large aspiration for a man who spends his days worrying about authentication modules. But it fits the pattern. The whole company is one long argument that people should stop redoing each other's work and start sharing the parts that don't need to be rebuilt. Whether that is login screens or something larger, the instinct is the same.