Taher Lokhandwala
founder & builder · san francisco bay area
I'm Taher, a founder, product designer, and investor in the San Francisco Bay Area. My work lives in a few worlds at once: Safelock Holdings, the all-equity self-storage firm I co-run; a family of platforms for the Dawoodi Bohra community I grew up in; and angel checks into early-stage startups I believe in.
Along the way, I joined Delve (YC W24) as its second employee and grew it from $1M to $30M in annualized revenue in fifteen months, leading growth and product. These days nearly everything I ship, this page included, is built alongside AI agents. I'm still learning how to build, and I don't pretend to understand every layer yet: that's exactly what makes it fun.
- Running Safelock, our all-equity self-storage firm, and leasing up both facilities: Longview, Texas and Dothan, Alabama. The ads, vendor RFPs, and call attribution all run on AI.
- Shipping Sautuliman v5 to roughly a hundred thousand people a month.
- Rebuilding Alishraaq: 62,000 documents of Bohra scholarship, finally fast and searchable.
- Prototyping Zameel, a wrist-worn voice agent: a screenless tap-to-record puck (ESP32 + LTE, with a Plaud recorder as the stopgap) feeding a Claude agent that has tiered permission to touch my calendar, email, and messages. The thinking, the devices, and the dead ends are all in the build log.
companies
- 2024– Safelock Holdings ↗ active
All-equity self-storage across Alabama and Texas, operated with an unusual amount of AI.
- 2023–25 Install IoT ↗ quiet
A turnkey field-services company installing IoT sensors and smart devices for enterprise clients.
- 2023–24 StarBrite Dental ↗ quiet
Ops modernization at my family’s two-location dental practice: AI phone agents, patient reactivation, insurance automation.
- 2026– AI consulting active
Forward-deployed AI engineering for companies that want their operations to run like Safelock's.
- 2022–23 Sentinyl ↗ quiet
Smart maintenance for industrial plants, spun out of Sensyrtech. Think IoT and AI on the factory floor.
- 2024 Reviewforge quiet
Conversational AI that calls dental patients for a warm, honest chat and turns it into reviews.
community
- Sautuliman ↗ live
The community’s media platform, used by about 100k people a month. I fully redesigned it as principal product designer, then brought in the team at Hexcode; now I contribute on the dev team and build new features.
- 2020– Alishraaq active
A fast, searchable home for 62,000 documents of Bohra scholarship. Semantic search and cross-script transliteration, blended with reciprocal rank fusion.
- 2025– Mumineen Hiking ↗ annual
Registration, payments, and trail logistics for a community hike in the mountains every summer.
- 2026 Ashara tooling seasonal
Small tools for the community’s biggest weeks of the year: passes, hotel blocks, honest feedback.
experiments
- 2026– Zameel prototype
A wrist-worn voice companion: tap, speak, and a safety-tiered agent does the rest. Built in the open.
- 2026– Learning to code ongoing
A from-scratch engineering curriculum: CS50, The Odin Project, and the long way around on purpose.
security
- 2026– Security research ongoing
Authorized assessments of platforms I’m invited to test, and of my own products. Responsible disclosure, always.
- 2026 Red-team lab research
Measuring whether uncensored open-weight models can actually do offensive-security work. A graded, adversarial evaluation.
- –2018
Houston, Texas: where I grew up. Memorized the Holy Quran at Mahad al-Zahra during high school.
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Received the official Shahadat Hifz al-Quran from Al-Azhar University, under Qaari Mohammed Al-Qalamawi.
- 2018–23
UC Davis: Managerial Economics and Philosophy.
- 2020–23
Sensyrtech: co-founded my first company; industrial IoT for oil, gas, and manufacturing. Did $500K in booked revenue selling to EOG Resources, Saudi Aramco, Stanley Black & Decker, and others.
- 2022–23
Sentinyl: our smart-maintenance platform, an evolution of Sensyrtech. GPT had just launched, and we built an early intelligent system that read a plant’s work orders, docs, and SOPs to teach technicians on the floor. read →
- 2023–25
Install IoT: founded a field-services company wiring sensors into enterprise buildings.
- 2023–24
StarBrite Dental: came home, finished my degree, and ran ops at our family dental practice while hunting for a company to build. Learned DSOs and dental PE deep, deployed two YC companies there, then left to build Reviewforge. I’ll build the StarBrite DSO someday.
- 2024
Reviewforge: conversational AI that calls dental patients for honest feedback.
- 2024–
Safelock Holdings: buying self-storage with equity, no debt.
- 2024–26
Delve (YC W24): second employee; led growth and worked across product, ops, and much of the business. $1M to $30M in annualized revenue in fifteen months, with an early team that will win big. read →
The fastest way to reach me is email. I read everything.