Nitya Subramanian

Nitya Subramanian is a technology product and engineering leader and the founder and chief executive officer of Para, a company developing wallet infrastructure for fintech and cryptocurrency applications. She founded Para in 2022 and has led it since June of that year.

Based in San Francisco, Subramanian has described her founding premise as the idea that cryptocurrency infrastructure would increasingly disappear into the background of people’s everyday interactions with digital assets.^[1]​^[2]​^[3]​

Subramanian says Para supports companies in fintech, cryptocurrency, and identity and serves more than 10 million users through its work with them.^[2]​

Career

Para

​Para is a wallet infrastructure and as a wallet and authentication suite for cryptocurrency applications. The company’s work includes Transaction Permissions, a feature Subramanian announced as generally available on September 24, 2026. The feature lets users define where an agent’s wallet can send funds and how much it can spend; each transaction is checked against those rules before signing. Subramanian described the permissions as a way to encode rules for money movement in the transaction layer.^[1]​^[3]​

On October 7, 2026, Subramanian said Para was joining Mastercard’s Crypto Partner Program and described the partnership as advancing the use of stablecoins in everyday commerce.^[3] In May 2026, she highlighted a Forbes feature about Para’s expansion into agentic commerce, including agent-driven purchasing decisions and work with Para customers.^[3]​

Celo and Valora

Subramanian worked at Celo Core Co. from August 2018 to March 2022, first in engineering and then as product lead from February 2019 until March 2022. From 2019 to 2020, she led product work across applications, identity, consumer products, and developer experience. From 2020 to 2021, she led the Product Adoption Group, which covered product management, product operations, product design, and support. During her time at Celo, she incubated and spun out the Valora mobile wallet and later worked on Celo Commerce.^[1]​

From June 2021 to June 2022, Subramanian was Valora’s founding head of product and later an adviser. She was Valora’s initial creator and helped support its spinout from Celo Labs into a standalone company before moving into an advisory role focused on product.

Valora is a mobile-optimized cryptocurrency wallet for saving, sending, and spending digital assets, including stablecoins, and supports instant transactions and web3 applications.^[1]​

Blend

Subramanian joined Blend as a software engineer in July 2015, later becoming an engineering manager and then engineering group lead for product engineering.

She held the group-lead role from January to August 2018 and led product-engineering development teams of about 20 people. She has described Blend as the start of her career in fintech and said she joined when it was among the company’s first 30 employees.^[1]​^[2]​

Education and Early Work

Subramanian studied computer science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she earned a bachelor’s degree and minored in mathematics. She was also an undergraduate researcher at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from January 2013 to June 2015. She has said that she became interested in Bitcoin while studying computer science and mathematics at MIT.^[1]​^[2]​

Her earlier technical work included an engineering internship at Cisco in 2012 and an internship in Yahoo’s Europe, Middle East, and Africa region in 2013. At Yahoo, she built a recommendation engine to analyze overlap among advertising segments and identify targeting groups using collaborative filtering and statistical and machine-learning techniques; the profile projected annual product revenue of $2 million.

In 2014, as a software engineering intern at Locu, she implemented an end-to-end process to improve the tokenization of optical-character-recognition output using machine learning and other techniques.^[1]​

In 2010, Subramanian interned in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. Working with Professor Eric Brewer, Scott McNeil, and graduate student Assane Gueye, she contributed to “Matlabu Chifai,” a medical-record system intended for rural hospitals and boarding schools in Senegal. Her work included writing Ruby on Rails unit and functional tests, changing the application’s information flow, designing a logo, and presenting the project to Berkeley faculty and graduate students.^[1]​

Writing and Public Speaking

Subramanian writes about stablecoins and cryptocurrency in a personal Substack newsletter and on the Para blog. Selected essays include “The Two Stablecoin Futures,” “Unpacking the Crypto Wallet Stack,” “Composability Isn't Just for Crypto,” and “The 10,000 Account Problem.”^[2]​

Her public appearances have addressed Para, cryptocurrency wallets, agent wallets, stablecoins, and crypto infrastructure. Coverage and interviews have included a Forbes feature titled “$200 a Week for Chipotle: Inside Para's Bet on Agent Wallets,” a Fortune article about wallet makers and banking, and a Finance Magnates interview about competition among contracts for difference brokers as wallet infrastructure moves into retail finance.

Her podcast appearances include Forbes’ On the Margin with Boaz Sobrado, On the Brink with Castle Island, Around The Coin, On the Other Side, and Web3 Galaxy Brain, where she was identified as founder of Capsule.^[2]​

Subramanian has spoken at DBA Research Day about composability, at ETH Denver 2024 on “Wallet Endgame,” and at Zero Knowledge Summit on how multiparty computation enables more expressive and programmable transactions. She also spoke at a16z Crypto Startup School about products and protocols; TechCrunch featured that talk.^[2]​