Summary
Ben De Waal is a seasoned Silicon Valley engineering leader and entrepreneur with 12 years of documented experience and a track record of founding, scaling, and exiting startups. Currently VP of Research and Development at RapidFort, he previously built and led world-class engineering teams and FinTech platforms as VP at Revance and as Founding CTO of HintMD. His career spans deep technical roles—from GPU software leadership at NVIDIA to building secure mobile access platforms and integrations at NetApp and ionGrid—showing rare breadth across systems, hardware-adjacent software, and cloud integrations. A hands-on builder who enjoys solving hard problems, he is named inventor on 65 patents as of 2023, reflecting sustained innovative impact. Based in San Jose, he blends product-focused execution with technical depth and a history of successful acquisitions of teams and technology he helped create. Less obvious: he has alternated intense engineering sprints with creative sabbaticals, including a brief culinary co-founder role, signalling both versatility and a taste for unconventional leadership experiences.
12 years of coding experience
30 years of employment as a software developer
B Eng Electronics (Signal Processing Computer Architecture), B Eng Electronics (Signal Processing Computer Architecture) at University of Pretoria
English, Afrikaans