I'm Revant Jhalani. I'm 26, based in Mumbai, originally from Ratlam — a small town in Madhya Pradesh that had no Amazon, no electronics shops to speak of, and a lot of time. I build systems across hardware, software, and AI, generally end to end, often solo. I'm open to work and collaboration.
Taking things apart
The short version of where the engineering comes from: I opened every toy I owned. I wasn't careful about it. An RC car would last a week before it was a pile of parts on the floor, and I'd be sitting with the circuit board trying to figure out what the little black squares did. At some point the sequence reversed — I stopped disassembling things I owned and started assembling things that didn't exist. The first one was a model rocket. Then more rockets. Then the chemistry that makes rockets go, because I couldn't buy proper rocket fuel in Ratlam and had to make it from saltpeter fertiliser and whatever else I could source locally.
This is the part of the story I'll be honest about and brief. Between roughly age 10 and 14, I spent a lot of vacations experimenting with improvised chemistry — rockets, propellants, the kinds of things an unsupervised kid with internet access and a chemistry textbook shouldn't have been making. I'm not going to detail it, because the recipes aren't the interesting part and publishing them would be irresponsible. What matters is that this is where resourcefulness came from. I didn't have components. I didn't have catalogues. I had a town, a workshop of torn-apart electronics, and problems I wanted solved — so I scavenged, substituted, and improvised. Nail polish became solvent. Fertiliser became oxidiser. An aquarium air pump became a cam-driven chamber-clearing mechanism on a combustion-powered BB launcher I built when I was 13.
The pivot
Around 8th grade, two things converged. I learned Arduino, which meant I could finally make circuits do what I wanted instead of what was on the PCB by default. And I realised the remote-controlled ignition mechanism I'd built for something I shouldn't have been making was the same mechanism — exactly — as a home-automation relay. Swap the payload. Flip the logic. The hardware didn't care. I started making motion-activated lights, remote-controlled appliances, alarm systems. The energy went somewhere constructive.
My first real deployment was the washrooms at my boarding school, Daly College in Indore. The lights stayed on all day; I retrofitted them with motion sensors I'd soldered together, hiding the soldering iron from dorm supervision because it wasn't allowed on campus. It worked. Around the same time I built an alarm system for my English teacher, Mrs. Sable — a multi-node wireless setup that turned out to be a mesh network, though I wouldn't learn the term for another year.
Boarding school, broadly
The rest of school was a lot of parallel tracks. I picked up C++ as a subject in 10th and stayed with it — it's a good first language because it doesn't lie to you about what the machine is doing. I started playing with Kali Linux around the same time, initially because I wanted to understand how our school network worked and eventually because I wanted to understand how networks work in general. I got acquainted with a few known exploits on the Windows XP SP2 machines the school ran. I built a C++ encryption system I called Kryptos, where the password was a pipeline of ciphers rather than a key — probably not cryptographically sound but genuinely interesting to build at 15.
By the end of 12th grade I'd decided not to go to college. This was the clearest decision I've made. I'd been learning for years at a pace that didn't match any institution's curriculum, in domains colleges in India at that time didn't teach well if at all. The opportunity cost of four years in a classroom that would teach me less than six months of self-directed building felt obvious. My parents were not thrilled but agreed to see what would happen.
Mumbai
I took some money I'd made on an early Ripple position and moved to Mumbai in 2017. For the next six to eight months I did essentially nothing but read, experiment, and build. I bought every microcontroller platform I could afford — FPGAs, STMs, PICs, all the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips that were then newly cheap. I bought a cheap 3D printer. Later a CNC. I taught myself embedded Linux properly, not just as a user. I did a lot of things badly and a few things well, and eventually the first real client work showed up: a multi-projector sync installation for an artist at NGMA.
That project turned into a second one for Chennai Biennale Foundation, which turned, eventually — two years later — into Arzen, the digital signage platform now running across ~4,500 cinema screens. The pattern I've since seen repeated: something I built as a one-off for a small problem has a seed in it that, with the right later opportunity, grows into a product. I try to build things cleanly enough that the seed survives.
Teaching
Somewhere in this arc I spent time teaching what I'd learned. I designed a hardware-and-programming curriculum for children — drag-and-drop code, commercial Arduino parts, a final project where the student leaves with a programmable car they built. I taught it in person at one school to establish the course, then handed it off. What it taught me was that I could take any technical concept and make it accessible to any audience if I spent the time, and that this matters — both for explaining projects to non-technical clients and for building teams across disciplines.
What I do now
I work across hardware, software, and AI. I build end to end — the design, the code, the device, the cloud, the deployment, the handoff. I'm generally the only engineer on whatever I'm on, and I've gotten unusually productive at being the only engineer. The projects page has the commercial and client work. The experiments page has the personal builds — speakers, rovers, the hydroxy-powered BB gun from 8th grade, and various other things I made while figuring out what I was doing.
If there's something you're trying to build or fix, say hi.
Curious what I'm like off the clock? Know me a little better.