Shruthi Rao was interviewing for a job. Not pitching an idea, not raising money - sitting across from Tim Wagner, the engineer who had run the serverless team at Amazon, answering the usual questions. Somewhere in that conversation she flipped the script and asked one of her own: why had nobody tried to apply serverless approaches to blockchain workloads? The two of them had, between them, launched and scaled both of those technologies at Amazon. The question hung there. It did not get answered that day. It became a company instead.
That company is Vendia, a San Francisco outfit that helps enterprises share and reconcile data in real time across different companies, different clouds, and different tech stacks. Rao co-founded it in 2020 and has raised more than $50 million to build it. But the more interesting thing about her is not the funding number. It is the pattern that keeps repeating across her career - a habit of walking into rooms early, asking the question nobody else is asking, and then doing the unglamorous work of building the answer from nothing.
The patternBuild from zero, over and over
Rao trained as a computer scientist - a BS from the National Institute of Engineering in India - and then did the thing a lot of technical people do when they want to understand how businesses actually work: she went to McKinsey. From there her path reads less like a ladder and more like a set of switchbacks. Corporate development at Bank of America. A stint helping launch AT&T U-verse TV during the 2008 financial crisis, when launching anything felt like swimming against the tide. Co-leading AT&T's acquisition of DirecTV. Work at the fraud-detection startup Feedzai. An MBA in entrepreneurship from Pepperdine along the way, and later the Stanford Executive Program.
The connective tissue is not an industry or a title. It is a preference for standing things up rather than maintaining them. She has said her career has been about scaling businesses from zero, and the resume backs it up - the through-line is always the launch, the first version, the thing that did not exist last quarter.
Early to the partyA crypto mine before crypto was a word
In 2011, Rao set up what she describes as India's first cryptocurrency mining operation. This was years before "blockchain" showed up on a single enterprise slide, before the ICO boom, before any of it was fashionable. Being that early usually looks a little foolish right up until the moment it looks obvious. For Rao it turned into a decade of standing on the inside of the movement - as an early investor, contributor, and advisor to the Ethereum Project, Ripple, the Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative, the Linux Foundation, and the World Economic Forum.
All of that advising, she has suggested, doubled as something more useful than a title: market research. By the time she got to Amazon Web Services around 2017, she had already spent years watching where distributed-ledger ideas worked and where they quietly fell apart.
Inside AmazonFounding blockchain at AWS
At AWS, Rao founded the blockchain practice and launched two products that put Amazon's name on distributed-ledger technology: Amazon Managed Blockchain and Amazon Quantum Ledger Database. She also led business development for the serverless portfolio - Lambda, API Gateway, Cognito, and roughly a dozen other services. That is a rare combination. Not many people have run a real business on serverless and a real business on blockchain. Rao is one of the few who has done both.
That overlap is exactly what made her interview question so pointed. Serverless made infrastructure disappear - you stopped thinking about servers at all. Blockchain made shared, trusted records possible between parties who did not trust each other. Nobody had really tried to fuse the two. So she and Wagner set out to do it.
The listening tourWhat 1,092 executives actually wanted
Here is where a lot of technical founders would have led with the technology. Rao did the opposite. Before committing to a product, she talked to 1,092 company executives - and discovered that almost none of them wanted blockchain. What they wanted was access to their own data, which had scattered itself across clouds, partners, and incompatible systems. The refrain she heard again and again was some version of: my data is dispersed across clouds, partners and tech stacks, and I need access to all of it, in real time.
That finding reshaped everything. Vendia is, under the hood, inspired by blockchain and built on serverless. But Rao refuses to sell it that way, because she learned the hard way that no customer wakes up with a serverless-blockchain problem.
It is a small discipline that separates a lot of successful infrastructure companies from a lot of dead ones. The technology can be genuinely novel and you still lead with the pain, not the plumbing. Rao says it plainly: Vendia is inspired by blockchain but not a blockchain. Customers with multiple partners, each guarding their own data, each needing to believe in the same version of the truth - that is who Vendia is for.
The betData sharing, not data storage
Strip Vendia down to a sentence and Rao's thesis is this: enterprise data does not really have a storage problem anymore. Storage is cheap and solved. What it has is a sharing problem. The moment two companies need to operate on the same set of facts - a supply chain, a settlement, a claim - the whole thing gets stuck in silos, reconciliation, and mutual distrust. Rao built a company on that one distinction, and it is the kind of idea that fits on a napkin precisely because someone spent a thousand conversations sharpening it.
It is worth noticing that this is a deliberately unsexy problem. Data reconciliation does not trend. But boring problems are frequently where the money hides, and Rao seems entirely comfortable there. She would rather own the plumbing of how companies trust each other's data than chase whatever is loud that quarter.
The personCurious, customer-obsessed, early
The traits that show up across her interviews are consistent. She works backward from customer pain rather than forward from technology. She is relentlessly curious - the whole company started because she could not let a question go. She is collaborative, quick to credit her partnership with Wagner. And she is comfortable being early, which is its own kind of nerve. It is easy to be early once by accident. Doing it repeatedly - crypto in 2011, blockchain at AWS in 2017, cross-cloud data sharing in 2020 - is a choice.
Rao sits on the Forbes Business Council and turns up on stages and podcasts talking about data collaboration and the future of multi-party computing. Her aim, stated in various forms, is to make sharing data across companies and clouds as simple and trustworthy as a single shared database - so organizations can collaborate in real time without ever handing over control of what is theirs. It is a big goal dressed in plain clothes, which is more or less how she has run her whole career.
The interview that started it all is a good tell. Most people go into a job interview trying to get hired. Rao went in and found a co-founder, a thesis, and a decade of work - all because she asked the question on her mind instead of the one she was supposed to.