Taher Lokhandwala
founder & builder · san francisco bay area
I'm Taher, a founder, product designer, and investor in the San Francisco Bay Area. My work lives in a few worlds at once: all things early-stage GTM, Safelock Holdings, the all-equity self-storage firm I co-run; investing in and supporting founders I believe in, and building for the Dawoodi Bohra community I'm a part of.
Grew an AI compliance company named Delve from $1 to $30m in ARR in 15mo as 2nd employee. Learned a ton about what to do and what not to do.
Back to founding now :)
- Tinkering on new moonshots in robotics and infrastructure.
- Running Safelock, our all-equity self-storage firm, and leasing up both facilities: Longview, Texas and Dothan, Alabama. The ads, vendor RFPs, and call attribution all run on AI.
- Shipping Sautuliman, a music player app to 100k MAU's.
- Building Alishraaq: 62,000 documents of low-resource language scholarship, finally fast and searchable.
- Prototyping Zameel, a push-to-talk wrist-worn AI device that connects to Claude and gets things done.
companies
- 2024– Safelock Holdings ↗ active
All-equity self-storage across Southern United States, operated with an unusual amount of AI.
- 2023–25 Install IoT ↗ active
Built a nationwide agency of expert technicians delivering IoT services to fulfill the delivery gap in the the industry. Working with T-Mobile, P&G, Aramark, Nokia, and more.
- 2023–24 StarBrite Dental ↗ active
Ops modernization at my family’s two-location dental practice: AI phone agents, patient reactivation, insurance automation, RCM, agentic workflow automation.
- 2026– AI consulting active
Forward-deployed AI engineering for companies with a bias-to-action. We prefer less talk, more outcomes.
- 2024–26 Delve alumni
YC W24, employee number two. Led growth and worked across product, ops, and much of the business, from $1M to $30M in annualized revenue in fifteen months.
- 2022–23 Sentinyl ↗ quiet
Smart maintenance and AI for industrial plants, spun out of Sensyrtech. Great idea, but too early and not enough traction.
- 2020–23 Sensyrtech quiet
My first company: industrial IoT for oil, gas, and manufacturing. Did $500K in booked revenue selling to EOG Resources, Saudi Aramco, Stanley Black & Decker, and others.
- 2024 Reviewforge quiet
Conversational AI that calls dental patients for a warm, honest chat and turns it into reviews. Worked great but small space and bigger fish to fry.
community
- Sautuliman ↗ live
The community’s media platform, used by about 100k people a month. I fully redesigned it as principal product designer, then brought in the incredible team at Hexcode; now I contribute on the dev team and build new features.
- 2020– Alishraaq active
A fast, searchable home for 62,000 documents of Bohra scholarship. Semantic search and cross-script transliteration, blended with reciprocal rank fusion.
- 2025– Mumineen Hiking ↗ annual
We do a big mountaineering trip every summer with 50 people. Built reg, budgeting, accommodation and transport tooling to make it easier to do more.
experiments
- 2026– Zameel prototype
A wrist-worn voice companion: tap, speak, and a safety-tiered agent does the rest. Building in the open.
- 2026– Learning to
codeengineer ongoingA from-scratch engineering curriculum: CS50, The Odin Project, and the long way around on purpose.
security
- 2026– Security research ongoing
Authorized assessments of platforms I’m invited to test, and of my own products.
- 2014–2018
Went to high school in Houston, Texas and memorized the Holy Quran at Mahad al-Zahra.
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Received the official Ijaza Hifz al-Quran from Al Azhar University, one of the oldest public universities in the world - under Qaari Mohammed Al-Qalamawi.
- 2019–23
UC Davis: Managerial Economics and Philosophy. Started, dropped out to start my first company, then finished in up.
- 2021–22
Sensyrtech: co-founded my first company; industrial IoT for oil, gas, and manufacturing. Did $500K in booked revenue selling to EOG Resources, Saudi Aramco, Stanley Black & Decker, and others.
- 2022–23
Sentinyl: our smart-maintenance platform, an evolution of Sensyrtech. GPT had just launched, and we built an early intelligent system that read a plant’s work orders, docs, and SOPs to teach technicians on the floor. read →
- 2023–25
Install IoT: founded a field-services company providing specialized IoT technicians to all our old vendors and the broader industry.
- 2023–24
StarBrite Dental: came home, finished my degree, and ran ops at our family dental practice while hunting for a company to build. Learned DSOs and dental PE deep, deployed two YC companies there, then left to build Reviewforge. Coming back to build the StarBrite DSO.
- 2024
Reviewforge: conversational AI that calls dental patients for honest feedback.
- 2024–
Safelock Holdings: buying self-storage & industrial flex with equity, no debt. read →
- 2024–26
Delve: second employee; led growth and worked across product, ops, and much of the business. $1M to $30M in annualized revenue in fifteen months, with an early team that will definitely go on to win big.
The fastest way to reach me is email. I read everything.