Tahir Mahmood

Tahir Mahmood is a pioneering technologist and entrepreneur with over four decades of experience at the intersection of operating systems, distributed computing, artificial intelligence, and blockchain. Born in Pakistan and educated at Loughborough University, he began his career in 1989 as Technical Lead for Operating Systems and Programming Languages at Microsoft — joining before Satya Nadella and contributing to foundational work in the early era of personal computing.

Over the course of his career, Tahir became the sole inventor of more than 40 patents spanning Web3, IoT, telecommunications, and AI. Among his most significant contributions is the invention of Push Email, the technology that provided the foundation for BlackBerry's real-time messaging capability. He subsequently founded and led multiple technology ventures across the globe, consistently operating at the frontier of emerging technology — from enterprise systems and financial infrastructure to blockchain and cloud architecture — and maintained a hands-on role as a full-stack developer throughout.

In 2022, Tahir co-founded KRNL Labs with Asim Ahmad to address what he saw as one of the most critical unresolved problems in blockchain development: the fragmentation of the Web3 ecosystem across dozens of incompatible networks. As CTO and co-founder, he led the development of KRNL's core protocol — an enhanced Geth client with custom GraphQL runtime that enables decentralised applications to offload execution tasks across chains and Web2 infrastructure, operating like a package manager for cross-chain functions.

KRNL Labs raised a pre-seed round from Blockchain Founders Fund, Builder Capital, Ryze Labs, and WAGMI Ventures. The company has since announced a partnership with Sig Network to deliver cryptographically secure cross-chain asset transfers, and has expanded its protocol to support integrations with Euler Finance and other major DeFi protocols. Tahir is based in Bangkok and continues to drive the technical roadmap for KRNL as it scales toward mainstream Web3 developer adoption.