Currently building Edible Factor

NIKHIL BALLAL

Hiring engineers and designers for a decade. Now building with them: Edible Factor, Plate, and the brands around them.

  • Based Bengaluru, India
  • Doing Product, build, brand
  • Status Creating for you
Scroll

Selected work

Five surfaces. One
operating system for
hospitality, and a shelf
for the nights you keep.

Live
Edible Factor dashboard in paper-white light mode: a dining budget and calorie tracker.
app.ediblefactor.com
02

Edible
Factor App

The consumer app: real-time budget and calorie tracking together, an AI sommelier, menu scanning. iOS, Android and web from one Next.js codebase.

  • Consumer app
  • Next.js
  • Go
  • AI
Read the case study app.ediblefactor.com
Plate, the restaurant operating system, on a laptop.
03

Plate

The restaurant operating system, by Edible Factor. Menu intelligence, claim-to-onboard, operator analytics. Sold to its first restaurant over a rooftop demo on two bars of 4G.

  • Restaurant OS
  • 4 outlets
  • 15 dishes
  • 0 pager duty
plate.ediblefactor.com The rooftop close
Gautam Shetty executive portfolio: a clean personal site shipped end to end.
04

Gautam
Shetty

An executive portfolio for a twenty-year talent leader, shipped end to end: brand, build, deploy. A static Astro build, blank page to live domain.

  • Brand
  • Web
  • Commission
gautamshetty.me
Live
Remember., a ticket-stub collector, in light mode: a shelf of collected concert stubs.
installable pwa
05

Remember.

A ticket-stub collector: a shelf for the nights you keep. Snap a stub, it reads itself on-device. No backend, no account, your phone and nothing else.

  • On-device OCR
  • IndexedDB
  • PWA
  • No backend
Open the app Star on GitHub
Partner Ninan's Steakhouse, Bengaluru The site

The trajectory

A decade finding the people who build the future,
then building it with them.

Nikhil Ballal, cut out against the page.
The operator, off duty

Nearly a decade inside the engine room of tech hiring. At Arctic Wolf, the partner senior engineering leaders called when a role had been open for three quarters. At Proximity Works, the first talent hire, the one who set the bar for everyone who walked through the door after.

He learned, slowly and then all at once, that the best builders kept describing the same software that did not exist. So in 2025 he stopped looking for the people to build it and started building it himself. Edible Factor and Plate are the first two pieces.

He still picks up calls about hiring. Mostly though, he ships.

Stealth Startup 2025 / Now
Now spinning Builder, CEO & Founder

Built and shipped Edible Factor and Plate. Customer calls in the evenings, ships in the mornings. Treats the product, the pitch and the press release as one craft.

On screen

Worked the other
side of the camera, too.

BritanniaLittle Hearts x Bourbon.A national TVC for one of India's most loved biscuit brands.
A23Find the Joker
A23 RummyFind the Joker.Online rummy campaign reel.

Also fronted big-budget traditional media: a national trampoline-park TVC, a leading cellular-network campaign, and the Samsung Galaxy launch shoot at the Opera House on Brigade Road for the Korean investor reveal.

Nikhil at the beach, flexing, the ocean and waves behind him.

Off the clock

Off the
clock.

Salt, sun, and a clean main branch.

Writing

Notes from
the battlefield.

All thought pieces