Entrepreneurship, for Sandeep Nailwal, did not begin as a grand ambition. It was closer to necessity. Growing up in Ramnagar in Uttarakhand, he was clear early on that improving his family’s circumstances would require building something of his own. By middle school, he was tutoring juniors and reselling pens at a margin. The instinct to build came early, but the idea of building something large took shape much later.
That shift, he says, came from watching Mark Zuckerberg. It nudged him towards computer science at Maharaja Agrasen Institute of Technology in Delhi, followed by an MBA from NITIE in Mumbai. The plan, in his words, was simple and somewhat naive: build something like Facebook. “That part didn’t go as planned,” he said.
Even as late as 2016, before starting his first venture Scope Weaver, Nailwal did not see himself building a large company. The default plan was stability – buy a house, settle down. That changed after a conversation at home. His wife’s response was direct: he would not be happy taking the safe route. “That removed the mental lock,” he said. He quit soon after.
The next step
The next step was less about chasing a specific idea and more about direction. Nailwal wanted to build something global from India, and technology seemed the only viable path. The insight that eventually led to Polygon came not from theory, but from frustration while working on blockchain projects. Writing smart contracts on Ethereum, he kept running into the same constraint: high transaction costs and slow processing.
“This was not a whitepaper problem,” he said. “You felt it every time a transaction cost more than lunch and the network slowed.” At the time, most Layer 2 solutions were focused on payments. That, he felt, missed the point. Developers were not just moving money; they were building applications. “If people are building on Ethereum, Layer 2 has to support the full EVM, not just transactions,” he said.
The idea was straightforward, that is, fix the infrastructure rather than optimise around its limitations. Instead of focusing on payments alone, the approach was to scale the full Ethereum experience which includes, smart contracts, developers, and users.
That thinking became the foundation of what would later be Polygon. The initial solution was a proof of stake sidechain aimed at addressing basic inefficiencies like speed and cost. But the scope expanded quickly. Payments required liquidity, interoperability and seamless movement across applications. The problem was not a single bottleneck but a system-level constraint. What began as a scaling solution evolved into what the team described as an “open money stack”.
The history of Polygon
Polygon, originally Matic Network, was founded in 2018 by Nailwal along with Jaynti Kanani and Anurag Arjun. The company was registered in Mumbai but operated out of a house in Bengaluru’s Indiranagar. The early team was small, largely made up of interns and junior engineers. One early decision shaped its trajectory, which is that they chose not to launch on a whitepaper alone. “We wanted a working testnet first,” Nailwal said. “Principled, yes. Great timing, not really.”
The timing coincided with the 2018 crypto downturn. Funding dried up. A committed investment of 100 BTC fell through days before Nailwal’s wedding as Bitcoin prices halved. “Our treasury was also in Bitcoin, so it halved too,” he said. Survival became the immediate priority.
Raising capital proved slow. Polygon eventually secured $5.6 million through Binance Launchpad in 2019, but the process took close to nine months. “They were thorough, especially because we were Indian,” he said. At multiple points, the founders were within months of running out of cash. “I remember asking other founders for $50,000 just to extend runway,” he added.
Credibility was another constraint. Earlier failures by Indian crypto projects had made investors cautious. Despite having a working product, meetings were hard to secure. The team focused instead on developers, participating in hackathons and explaining the technology directly. Adoption, in the early phase, was built ground-up.
The inflection came in 2021. Matic Network rebranded to Polygon and raised $450 million at a $14.4 billion valuation. The company also brought in Mihailo Bjelic as a co-founder and shifted from a single-chain approach to a broader multi-chain framework. “Market cap went from $87 million to nearly $19 billion,” Nailwal said. The company also began signing partnerships with large global firms, including Starbucks, Meta, Reddit, JPMorgan and Stripe.
Financially, the trajectory was steep. From a few million dollars in early funding, Polygon moved into the top tier of crypto startups, with a valuation crossing $20 billion at its peak and backing from investors such as Sequoia, SoftBank, Tiger Global, Accel and Mark Cuban. The company has since continued to expand its stack and capabilities, including acquisitions such as Coinme and Sequence earlier this year as part of its stablecoin push.
The underlying idea, however, has remained consistent. Identify what breaks at scale, fix it, and then expand the scope without losing focus. For Nailwal, the starting point was not a grand vision of blockchain infrastructure, but a recurring problem encountered in practice. The execution followed the same logic of solving for utility first, and building outward from there.