The people who built it
Spacebar was built by the team behind Pencil Spaces — four years of production at scale, carrying real customer workloads. The substrate was not designed in theory. We built the product, carried the load, measured the numbers, and then opened the platform.
Ayush Agarwal
Head of Product, Map Ads at Google. Led the product team responsible for Google Maps' advertising surface — one of Google's highest-revenue products — working across engineering, design, and business to define the roadmap and execution.
Head of Enterprise Products at Meta. Built and ran the enterprise product organization, overseeing the suite of tools Meta deploys to its own workforce and through Workplace by Meta.
Venture investing at Madrona Venture Group. Early-stage investing in Pacific Northwest technology companies. McKinsey before that.
Stanford GSB General Management Program. CS at University of Michigan. Grew up in Lucknow and Kathmandu.
Amogh Asgekar
Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google. Built and ran distributed systems handling hundreds of thousands of queries per second at sub-100ms latency targets. The CRDT engine, worker pool architecture, and desync detection at the core of Spacebar were designed by Amogh drawing directly on this experience.
The 50ms p99 event propagation is not a target — it is measured output. Systems that behave under real load behave differently from systems designed against benchmarks. Amogh has built systems under real load.
MTech, IIT Bombay.
Imran Ahmed
McKinsey & Company, QuantumBlack. Worked on advanced analytics and AI strategy for enterprise clients across financial services and technology. QuantumBlack (McKinsey's AI studio) focuses on applied machine learning in production environments — the same space Spacebar operates in.
MEng with distinction, University of Cambridge. Cambridge–MIT Exchange in Computer Science. The academic background is in systems and applied ML; the practitioner background is in shipping AI products into production environments with real constraints.
Swati Khandelwal
Operations and growth across the full Pencil Learning Technologies portfolio. Four years scaling Spacebar and Pencil Spaces from zero to production — managing the operational complexity of a live platform carrying real customer workloads across multiple product lines.
The COO role at a technical infrastructure company is the job of making the substrate reliable not just technically, but operationally: customer relationships, partner management, process design, and the systems that let engineering teams move fast without breaking things.
The company behind the platform.
Spacebar is built and operated by Pencil Learning Technologies — a San Francisco–based company founded in 2020. Our first product was Pencil Spaces, a real-time virtual classroom platform built on the Spacebar substrate. Pencil Spaces gave us four years of production experience at scale before we opened the platform to other builders.
We are a team of 60, profitable since early 2026. We did not grow the team to manufacture the appearance of velocity — we grew it when the revenue supported it. The substrate is not a prototype. The operating data on the platform page reflects real production, not a demo environment.
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