Nikhil Rao

Nikhil Rao is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Reflex, an open-source web framework startup based in San Francisco, California. Prior to establishing his own technology company, he spent over two years working as a Software Engineer at Apple, where he focused on building internal infrastructure and optimizing large-scale data processing systems. Under his executive leadership, Reflex transitioned from its original project name, Pyne, and successfully secured a $5 million seed funding round in late 2023 to accelerate its commercial product development. This critical early-stage financing initiative was led by Lux Capital, with additional strategic participation from prominent institutional investors including Y Combinator, BoxGroup, and Abstract Ventures. Rao currently focuses his efforts on expanding the open-source platform's core technical capabilities, enabling enterprise software engineers to build and deploy full-stack web applications entirely within the Python ecosystem.