Pranab Krishnan

CTO and Co-Founder

Pranab Krishnan is a technology entrepreneur, machine learning researcher, and co-founder & CTO of Zeal, a staffing operations platform that makes it easier for staffing companies to onboard, pay, and bill. Based in San Francisco, Pranab leads Zeal’s technical vision, oversees the engineering team, drives product architecture, and ensures the platform scales to support high-volume staffing operations. Prior to Zeal, Pranab worked in machine learning engineering at MITRE and as a bioinformatics fellow at the National Institutes of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK). He also served as a data analyst at The Wharton School. He is a Y Combinator alumnus through Zeal’s inclusion in the YC Summer 2019 cohort. Under his technical leadership, Zeal has secured $30M in funding. Beyond his day job, Pranab engages with the broader fintech and startup community, shares insights on product engineering and embedded finance, and contributes to discussions around scalable infrastructure, compliance automation, and fintech innovation.

Education

BS, Computer Science, University of Pennsylvania

Expertise

Software Engineering, Product Management, Entrepreneurship, Leadership

Blogs by Pranab Krishnan

Product Update: December 2025

January 1, 2026

Product Update: November 2025

December 1, 2025

Product Update: September 2025

October 1, 2025

Product Update: July 2025

August 5, 2025

Product Update: June 2025

July 3, 2025

New and Improved Tax Setup Page

November 23, 2022

Dig Into The Details with Disbursement Statuses

October 6, 2022

Manage International Contractors Without Missing a Step

September 29, 2022

Consistency is Key — Introducing Zeal’s Job Queue Webhook

September 1, 2022

Sharing Zeal’s Changelog

August 26, 2022

Zero Penalties with Zeal's Zero Wage Filing Feature

August 18, 2022

Engineering Culture @ Zeal

August 16, 2022

Keep Organized with Employer Documents and Updated Filing Statuses

August 4, 2022

Support your Savers with New Deduction Types at Zeal

July 7, 2022

Build with Clarity and Flexibility — Introducing Custom Names for Earning Components

June 30, 2022

Harness Deposit Schedules at Any Rate with Accelerated Payments

June 24, 2022

Aggregate your Data with YTD and QTD APIs

June 16, 2022

Upload and View With Ease—Zeal’s Revamped ID Verification Flow

June 9, 2022

Preview Check Data

June 2, 2022

Increase Employer Flexibility with Editing in the White-label

May 26, 2022

Pay Your Way with Commodity Wages

May 19, 2022

Launch your Payroll Product Faster Using Zeal’s Tax Page Component

May 5, 2022

Streamline Payroll Reporting with the Reports API

April 28, 2022

Making Taxes Less Taxing

April 21, 2022

The Deductions API — Helping Deduce the Best Deductions

April 19, 2022

Improve Employee Onboarding with Tooltips

April 14, 2022

Never Miss a Tax ID Again With Alerts

April 7, 2022

Save Time With Pre-Filled Documents

April 5, 2022

Tune Your Data Structure with Metadata and External IDs

March 31, 2022

Reducing Tax Complexity with Constraints

March 29, 2022

Onboard Contractors in Minutes — Contractor On-The-Fly Onboarding

March 22, 2022

Disbursing Your Own Funds? Check Out Prepaid Checks

March 17, 2022

Introducing Tax Exemptions

March 15, 2022

Announcing Onboarding Paperwork API

November 26, 2021

Guides by Pranab Krishnan

Zeal is a financial technology company, not an FDIC insured depository institution. Banking services provided by Bangor Savings Bank, Member FDIC. FDIC insurance coverage protects against the failure of an FDIC insured depository institution. Pass-through FDIC insurance coverage is subject to certain conditions.

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