NEAR Protocol Leadership

Shobhit Shukla is the Co-founder of Near, the world’s largest source of intelligence on people and places. Shobhit currently runs their global business, where he is responsible for executing Near’s vision to become the most accurate and privacy-safe source of intelligence on human mobility.



Prior to Near, Shobhit was the Head of Business Development at InMobi, driving publisher partnerships and alliances across Asia Pacific. He spent a year in Beijing setting up their China operations and scaling that to become one of their largest regions by revenue. He has also worked with Qualcomm Ventures and Morgan Stanley, which gave him a strong foundation in the investment sector.

Shobhit holds an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management and is advising multiple early stage startups across categories such as consumer products, renewables, education and SaaS on their growth strategy. Shobhit believes in work + life and spends his free time cooking, driving or learning to be curious from his one year old son.

John Faieta is a CFO, Near Americas at Near.

Michael Radford is a CTO, Near Americas at Near.

Gladys Kong has more than 15 years of experience in research, technology and management experience. Most recently, Gladys served as vice president of engineering at Snap.com. Prior to that, Gladys served as vice president of research and development for Idealab, where she oversaw the creation of numerous companies (including Evolution Robotics, Picasa, Insider Pages, Energy Innovations and X1). Prior to Idealab, Gladys participated in UCLA's CoBase Project, where she conducted research and development on intelligent and cooperative access methods to distributed and large scale database systems. Gladys holds a B.S. degree in Engineering and Applied Science from the California Institute of Technology and an M.S degree in Computer Science from UCLA.

Justin Joseph is a Chief People Officer at Near and is based in Karnataka, India. He has worked as Head, Mobile at Imere Techonologies Pvt Ltd and Project Lead at Netkode.

Kerry Pearce is a Chief Strategy Officer, Near Americas at Near.

Rahul has worked across various facets of the finance function from accounting, audit and advisory roles to FP&A, business and strategic finance, M&As, equity / debt financing, financial restructuring, investment banking and eventually managing the entire function end to end for large geographies Prior to Near, Rahul was heading finance for InMobi’s North America operations. He was instrumental in managing all things finance in the region including treasury, investor relations, fund raising activities and process improvements for the group. At InMobi, he was also heading finance for its Asia Pacific operations spread across 5 regions, 15 business locations and 10 legal entities where he helped set up and manage finance, secretarial and statutory compliances alongside building scalable process improvement models for InMobi. Rahul was a core member of the team that worked on $200 Million funding by Softbank to InMobi back in 2011.

Shobhit Shukla is the Co-founder of Near, the world’s largest source of intelligence on people and places. Shobhit currently runs their global business, where he is responsible for executing Near’s vision to become the most accurate and privacy-safe source of intelligence on human mobility.



Prior to Near, Shobhit was the Head of Business Development at InMobi, driving publisher partnerships and alliances across Asia Pacific. He spent a year in Beijing setting up their China operations and scaling that to become one of their largest regions by revenue. He has also worked with Qualcomm Ventures and Morgan Stanley, which gave him a strong foundation in the investment sector.

Shobhit holds an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management and is advising multiple early stage startups across categories such as consumer products, renewables, education and SaaS on their growth strategy. Shobhit believes in work + life and spends his free time cooking, driving or learning to be curious from his one year old son.