How a Former Apple Engineer Is Reinventing Expense Management

Keeping company spending under control is critical for financial transparency, accountability, and operational speed. Yet, most finance teams still waste valuable time chasing receipts, reviewing spreadsheets, and approving reimbursements using outdated systems that slow operations and often result in avoidable errors.

After recognizing these inefficiencies, serial entrepreneur and technologist Rushil Nagarsheth decided to develop an alternative. The result was Hypercard, a real-time expense platform that makes reimbursements instant, automates approvals, and flags misspending immediately—a complete overhaul of how expense operations traditionally work.

This article is a closer look at Rushil's life experiences, the systems he has built, and how they have laid the groundwork for Hypercard to shape the future of enterprise technology.

From Robotics in Dubai to Engineering Innovation in Canada

Rushil's passion for engineering started during his childhood in Dubai, when he built his first functional robot: a basic line-following machine. "It wasn't fancy, but it sparked something in me,"he recalls.

This early experience ignited a fascination with how physics, electronics, and software could work together to bring ideas to life, and he went on to guide his school's 'F1 in Schools' team from underdogs to national competitors.

In 2017, Rushil moved to Canada to attend the University of Waterloo, which is well-known for its engineering program, innovation, and a strong startup culture. Within his first year, he helped build a light-sensitive robot that played music autonomously and won a campus-wide engineering competition.

While still an undergrad, he was exposed to elite engineering environments through internships at Blackberry Messenger and Apple's Siri WatchOS and VisionPro team, where he worked on complex audio libraries and gained valuable experience with the intricacies of audio engineering and signal processing.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, Rushil was working remotely in the Siri Vision Pro team. Amidst lockdowns and growing isolation, he noticed a different epidemic spreading—loneliness. Traditional text-based communication tools felt cold and impersonal for a time that desperately needed real connection. "The world had changed, but the tools we used to support us did not," says Rushil.

With the aim of making communication faster, more human, and less reliant on walls of text, Rushil and his founding team built Rant, a messaging app where people could send ephemeral voice notes across social groups. Rushil spent his days interning and nights coding at Rant with his team, and they managed to build the MVP in just two weeks. He used the skills he learned at Apple to make the platform ultra-lightweight, enabling voice notes to be sent in just milliseconds.

Though Rant gained early traction and pre-seed backing, it ultimately suffered from the brutal realities of scaling—even great products struggle without virality and strong networks— and it eventually shut down.

It was during this time that he met Marc Baghadjian, one of his advisors whose ideas aligned with his own. Together, they joined forces to build another startup called Lolly, a video-first dating app developed during the TikTok boom which sought to replace static and curated dating profiles with short videos that captured who people really were.

The platform amassed over hundreds of thousands of users uploading short-form videos, but retention was a critical market constraint. After attempts to iterate and differentiate, the team opted for a different strategy when larger players began replicating their features.

Hypercard: Reinventing Back-Office Finance with Real-Time Intelligence

Rushil and Marc alongside Nikolas Ioannou regrouped in 2022 determined that their next move would be deliberate—built for business, not for virality.

While it's common to rush toward the next trend in consumer tech, the latest fads often burn bright but brief. They realized that success shouldn't depend on staying in the spotlight, but be rooted in solving problems that would still matter years from now. To that end, they turned their attention to back-office finance—a critical yet often overlooked part of every company's operations.

Despite the entire world moving toward digitalization and automation, finance operations remained slow, manual, and error-prone, and a desire to fix these issues inspired the creation of Hypercard.

Initially, the team envisioned Hypercard as the first employee-consumer credit card with premium benefits. However, it evolved into something more impactful: the first autonomous back-office intelligence platform for expense management.

Hypercard enables employees to swipe their cards, submit reimbursements in one click, and get approvals instantly. Rushil architected the AI engine that analyzes transaction data in real-time, flags out-of-policy spending, and enforces compliance automatically—eliminating the need for manual processes.

By integrating deeply with several data sources, Hypercard ensures that every expense is validated against company policies, employee roles, and organizational budgets, removing the administrative burden to deliver a seamless expense management experience that saves time, improves cash flow visibility, and strengthens compliance without slowing down operations.

Hypercard quickly attracted top-tier investors, including Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI), Gene Lockhart (former CEO of Mastercard), and Marc Randolph (co-founder of Netflix). It was recognized as one of the most promising fintech startups in 2024, highlighting its potential to reshape the future of enterprise finance through real-time intelligence and automation.

The Pivot to B2B: Applying Consumer-Grade Experience to Enterprise Tools

Rushil's years working in consumer tech have given him an intimate understanding of the power of user-centered design, instant feedback loops, and emotional resonance, while the collapse of Lolly and Rant showed him that even brilliant consumer apps can fail without the right growth mechanics.

"I've had a lot of hands-on experience building products – starting with consumer apps and now shifting into B2B," he reflects. "That journey has taught me a lot about user experience, fast iteration, and finding product-market fit the hard way."

Those insights now shape how Hypercard operates. Instead of building superficial features, it is engineered for simplicity, speed, and real human needs. It is a platform built for lasting value, showing that cross-pollination of consumer sensibilities into enterprise systems isn't just an advantage—it's essential for building technology that truly works at scale.

Staying Close to the Code: The Vision Going Forward

Despite Hypercard's momentum and high-profile success, Rushil remains grounded and focused primarily on product innovation. He maintains that his ultimate goal isn't fame, riches or public recognition, but solving meaningful problems by building thoughtful, people-first tools.

He believes that technology is a way to make life easier and more human—not more complicated.

Learn more about how Hypercard is transforming financial operations, and connect with Rushil Nagarsheth to learn how a builder's mindset is creating real change in enterprise technology.