Raul Patel

Raul Patel is a British-Indian technologist and entrepreneur based in London. He studied at Imperial College London, one of the UK’s leading engineering and science institutions, where he developed a strong foundation in computer science and software systems. Alongside his studies and early career, he founded Lunar Labs, an exploratory AI research group, and created Rstack, a rapid MVP deployment framework — early signals of a technical ambition focused on building tools that help developers and founders move faster.

Raul co-founded Hands In as CTO alongside Samuel Flynn to solve one of the most overlooked problems in consumer payments: the friction of splitting and collecting money in groups. While consumer payment apps have proliferated, group payment flows — splitting travel bookings, sharing costs across multiple cards, organising group contributions — remain clunky and unreliable, particularly in the travel and hospitality sectors where payment failures are costly. Raul led the technical build of Hands In’s multi-card payment infrastructure, which enables multiple people to contribute to a single transaction using different payment methods without the usual failure points.

The platform’s technology demonstrated measurable commercial impact: its multi-card solution reduced payment failures and drove over $6 million in incremental revenue for enterprise clients including Air Europa. Hands In raised over £1 million across its pre-seed and subsequent rounds from fintech angels including David Birch and David Parker, as well as Ryta Zasiekina of CONCRYT. The funding has supported expansion into travel, ticketing and hospitality, and deepened integrations with top payment service providers.