Dad. Founder. Engineer.
Hi, I’m Gideon Kalu. Sometimes, people call me “Chu”. I am a husband and a father obsessed with engineering, games, product scaling and distribution. I have spent the last 10 years building software products and working with teams across the US, Europe and Nigeria.
Sometimes, I write. Sometimes, I speak. I am focused on building and investing in resilient companies that simplify difficult industries, especially at the intersection of finance, gaming, and crypto.
You can find me on Twitter, or email me.
Current
Building a web3 game
Recently launched Bitoveen, a crypto wallet portal for gamers.
Bootstrapping Fyndle, a copilot for marketing teams, to $50k MRR
Tinkering with Game Design / Theory
Reading: The Moscow Rules by Antonio Mendez, Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham
Products
Bitoveen; the wallet companion for gamers and DeFi enthusiasts. Do more: manage, buy, store, trade, track, and earn crypto from one portal. Private. Non-custodial. Multichain.
Fyndle; an enterprise AI copilot for marketing teams to effortlessly generate professional content trained on their data.
Rovel; a financial OS designed to help solopreneurs and freelancers manage their entire business from one place.
StudioAI; an experimental project to generate professional headshots using AI , without a physical photo shoot; using Stable Diffusion via Dreambooth.
Gramme; Creator platform for creators to effortlessly create, distribute and sell digital products.
Nastra; a suite of powertools for developers.
Career
Cofounder, Femur:
A New York–based software lab creating amazing digital products for businesses and users.
CTO, RedPenguin:
A small software consultancy company based in London and Abuja, helping businesses eliminate single points of failure and optimize for digital efficiency and scale.
Engineering lead, Rovel:
A complete financial OS for business management. Born from the lack of software designed for ultra lean businesses and solopreneurs. We built Rovel to do just that —empower small teams and individuals with a powerful, all-in-one finance app that doesn’t suck.
Co-founder, Gramme:
Creator platform for creators to effortlessly create, distribute and sell digital products. Designed for creators looking to sell faster and more efficiently, Gramme also provides customers access to premium creators and developers.
Bootstrapped Nastra:
A suite of powertools for developers. Empowering developers to supercharge their projects with an ecosystem of powertools, from analytics, to code beautifier/minifiers, SQL validators, to custom bio page creation, link shortner and QR code tools.
Co-founder, Hermes Health (acquired):
I started Hermes Health alongside other co-founders to digitize the African healthcare value chain. By capturing the entire process in a seamless cloud application with provisioning for various providers: hospitals, pharma, consultants and labs. Hermes Health allowed providers to integrate their local ERP system with our EMR system.
Journey
I grew up in the lesser known parts of Abuja, Nigeria’s capital. My first computer was an old Intel Pentium II PC. It ran on Windows 2000 and stuttered a bit every time I tried to run anything other than Microsoft Notepad.
I picked up programming just before I got into college. Somehow, I managed to turn a curiosity to tinker with computers into a successful obsession for building products that are incredibly useful to people’s lives.
I have built products and worked on several amazing projects that’s helped hundreds of companies record increased combined revenue of over $100m. I have helped several startups scale their in-house engineering for maximum efficiency with as few people as possible.
As an entrepreneur, my success has largely stemmed from paying keen attention to what the market does, not what it says. My process for winning is a simple but not easy one: I identify potential future trends early, and assemble world-class teams to properly position for maximum value extraction.
After several years of building in tech and watching greedy corporations take advantage of the world, I made the decision to transition into an ecosystem building for an open world. One that truly empowered people and I would be proud of.
Web3
Several years ago, inspired by the promise of building an open world and the immense potential of a decentralized digital layer, I made the transition to building in crypto and have since not looked back. The industry is nascent, and the work is huge —a little daunting, even. But the thrill is unimaginable! Read my full thesis here.
