A young entrepreneur who entered technology through an internship, Lalwani now stands at the difficult intersection of distributed work, digital security and employee privacy.
In Miami, on the last night of a 75-day solo trip across the United States, Rishabh Lalwani checked out of his hotel early to save the cost of a few hours in a room. On the way to the bus station, he met a Russian student anxious about an online examination. The student mentioned software designed to prevent cheating. Lalwani, a commerce graduate who had never heard the term, typed one word into his notes: “proctoring.”
He returned to Pune with 156 business ideas. After several rounds of filtering, only four survived; proctoring was one. The story has the polished symmetry of an entrepreneurial anecdote. Yet its revealing detail is not serendipity. It is Lalwani’s habit of recording possibilities and then pursuing them long after the moment has passed.
That instinct predates technology. Lalwani describes himself as a seventh-generation entrepreneur from a Marwari family whose businesses, spanning jewellery, finance and construction, date to 1854. At eight, he says, he bought pencil packets wholesale and sold them to schoolmates for a small margin; later, he separated promotional tattoos from chewing-gum packets and sold those too. Business began with serving customers water. The lesson was unglamorous: usefulness came before scale.
His formal training followed a similarly practical route: commerce and taxation at Symbiosis, qualification as a company secretary, and a short business programme at Stanford in 2014. He was not an engineer entering technology through code. He approached it through costs, compliance, relationships and execution, an orientation that would later suit enterprise software, where deployment can matter as much as code.
Back in Pune, Lalwani found a three-month-old proctoring company with a “coming soon” website. His approaches as a prospective partner or investor went unanswered, so he applied to be an intern. He recalls being employee number 12, although departures had left a team of roughly six, half of them interns. Within two years, he had become a partner. His explanation is characteristically concise: “What we got on the table was simple: integrity.” His definition of luck is workmanlike: “You keep trying.”
From that proctoring base grew a broader set of identity and monitoring businesses. Lalwani says the organisation expanded to about 300 people and multiplied revenue roughly tenfold during his tenure. RemoteDesk emerged from the same technological lineage. According to the company, an American legal firm had sought a way to let attorneys work from home without weakening data security; a product followed in 2019, enterprise pilots during the pandemic, and a dedicated enterprise push in 2023.
Today, as RemoteDesk’s managing director, Lalwani is attempting to turn that origin story into a larger argument: in distributed work, identity cannot be treated as settled at login. The platform uses continuous facial verification and computer vision to flag risks such as an unauthorised person, a visible mobile phone or an obstructed camera. RemoteDesk says it has secured more than 100 million work hours and onboarded over 100,000 users across 200-plus business processes.
The proposition arrives at a consequential moment. Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report says breaches involving third parties rose to 48 per cent of the total, while employee use of unapproved “shadow AI” tripled to 45 per cent. For India’s outsourcing, healthcare and financial-services industries, the old perimeter of office walls and supervised floors is plainly inadequate.
But verification creates its own risk. A security system that watches the workspace can protect client data while also intruding into a home. RemoteDesk promotes a “zero knowledge” model under which, it says, raw session data is inaccessible even to the company. That addresses storage and access, but the broader question is one of proportionality. Britain’s Information Commissioner advises employers to use the least invasive means, document their purpose and assess impact before deploying biometric tools.
This is the unresolved test of Lalwani’s thesis: can an enterprise verify trust without normalising suspicion? Accuracy is only one measure. Transparency, proportionality, human review and a clear boundary between security and performance management will decide whether continuous assurance feels like protection or surveillance.
Curiously, Lalwani’s own management philosophy argues against permanent managerial visibility. He advocates an “8-8-8” day, eight hours each for sleep, life and work, and says employees should not need overtime if their working hours are sincere. He also says he takes about 150 days of holiday a year. The striking point is not the number, which is self-reported, but the operating principle behind it: define every team member’s outcome, build it into a system, and release the founder from daily operations to focus on strategy and growth.
His public language moves easily between KPIs and karma. He talks about conscious optimism, vision boards, spiritual study and making strangers smile; four generations of his family, he says, live under one roof and share most meals. The softer vocabulary can sit uneasily beside monitoring technology. Yet that friction is precisely what makes his profile more interesting than a conventional scale-up story. Lalwani is selling tools for accountability while insisting that leadership should be measured by clarity, not control.
India’s distributed-work future will not be secured by facial recognition alone. Employees must understand what is observed; clients must trust the evidence; boards must know where safeguards end and overreach begins. Lalwani’s childhood lesson was that value earns the margin. In workforce security, the bargain is narrower: verify enough to protect sensitive data, but collect no more than necessary. Whether RemoteDesk can scale that bargain remains an open question. Lalwani, who once turned rejection into an internship, has made persistence his answer to open questions.
