Team
The Power Behind
The founding team of Renteez is a rare blend of mission-driven grit, community leadership, and deep technical strength. The co-founders—a husband and wife duo—first met while volunteering for a science education nonprofit, and their partnership has since grown across both purpose and performance.
Together, they co-founded Rungmunch – Theater with a Cause, a recognized nonprofit that unites artists from diverse backgrounds to drive social change. That experience honed their ability to rally communities, run grassroots campaigns, and build systems of trust—all skills that translate directly into Renteez’s marketplace and user acquisition strategy.
One founder is a seasoned technologist and patented cybersecurity inventor, bringing strong product, platform, and infrastructure vision. The other is a former physician turned product leader and creative producer, with a strong track record in organizing large-scale, community-led initiatives. Their complementary backgrounds in technology, storytelling, and grassroots organizing enable them to build not just a platform—but a movement.
What makes them a winning team is their proven ability to turn values into action and ideas into scalable systems—while staying grounded in the real needs of people, partners, and platforms.
Smita Karhade
CEO
Smita Karhade, an Ex-physician who migrated from medicine to technology. She holds MS (CS), and Product Management from the HAAS School of Business. Smita has multiple patents pending with USPTO. Smita is a visionary person, empathetic listener, and inspiring speaker with high integrity & courage. She is passionate about translating conceptual ideas into unique products. A natural public speaker/communicator/presenter with strong leadership and relationship-building skills.
She is also a co-founder of a fundraising platform, Rungmunch - Theater with a Cause, that brings together artists of Indian origin for the betterment of the community. So far, the organization helped raise over $250,000 for various causes.
Madhav Karhade
CTO
Madhav Karhade has very strong experience in designing very high performance systems. He worked at many
companies and delivered flagship products, including, Juniper Networks, HP, AirTight Networks (Now Arista Networks). His experience
ranges from Linux Kernel, Networking, High Availability Clustering Algorithms, AI, Virtualization, Network Security & Protocol Development etc. He has two security patents on his name (Juniper) related to Firewall Policies.
He holds Masters Degree in Computer Engineering from Silicon Valley University and BS from University of Mumbai.
He is also active on Stage and co-founder of Non Profit Organization, Rungmunch - Theater with a Cause.
Dipankar Banik
Engineering
A software professionally since 2001. The first half of that was enterprise Java: portals, workflow systems, and integration work for Cisco, Kaiser Permanente, Gilead Sciences, Major League Baseball, and Marsh. A lot of it was getting new systems to work with old ones, such as AS400 and DB2 mainframes, Oracle Access Manager single sign-on, and Salesforce.
Since 2016 Dipankar has been at Narvar, working on the backend of the Returns platform. I own services end to end: design, code, infrastructure, and on-call. He enjoys the messy middle of distributed systems, like carrier webhooks that arrive late, twice, or out of order, where the system still has to end up with the right answer.
Recently he has been working on return fraud detection and a customer data platform. In both, Drools rules make the actual decisions so they stay auditable and repeatable, and LLM-based workflows handle the parts that are hard to write as rules.
He has led and mentored teams of six to ten engineers across the US and India. Outside work he likes to build small Raspberry Pi projects (gpati is on my GitHub) and walk the trails on Pleasanton Ridge.
Shirish Sathaye
Advisor
Shirish Sathaye is a General Partner at Cervin. He focuses on investments in next-generation enterprise software, cloud-based software, AI-powered businesses, wireless and wireline networking, data infrastructure and systems.
For 20+ years, Shirish has served as a General Partner across several venture firms. Prior to joining Cervin, he spent 10 years at Matrix Partners, 3 years at Khosla Ventures, and the remainder at Formation 8. His very first investment was Aruba Networks (NASDAQ:ARUN) which had a multi-billion IPO and acquisition. Shirish’s investment career was preceded by 15 years as leader in category-creating technology companies. He was VP of Engineering and CTO at Alteon Websystems, growing the startup from 20 to 800+ employees and taking it through a multi-billion IPO and acquisition. In addition, he headed the largest engineering group at FORE Systems, which also had a multi-billion IPO.
Shirish has a Ph.D in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, an MSEE from Virginia Tech, and a Bachelor's Degree in Electronics Engineering from IIT-BHU, Varanasi, India.
Outside of the office, Shirish enjoys hiking, running, and reading non-fiction. He is also a foodie who enjoys trying new restaurants and cuisines.
Dr. Anurag Maunder
Advisor
Dr. Anurag Maunder is the CEO of Sensable, Inc. Prior to Sensable, he was the SVP Engineering at Kindred AI: an autonomous robot company, and VP of Innovation Garage at Johnson Controls where he managed multiple AI projects for the Industrial world. He started his career with prestigious AT&T Labs (Bell Labs). He was the founder, CTO of Kazeon Systems that was acquired by EMC. He was also the Founder CEO of dLoop that was acquired by Box.
His current interests are focused on deriving operational intelligence from video analysis to make manufacturing and distribution centers safer and more efficient.
