The shoes cost $60. Ankur Jain was nine or ten, and he wanted them. His father, Naveen Jain, who grew up in a very poor Indian village, would not buy them. Ankur has recalled his father asking how he could possibly spend sixty dollars on a pair of basketball shoes.
So Ankur did something else. He built a website, then pitched a shoe company to send him free pairs in exchange for ads. He came home with the shoes. His parents did not punish him. They congratulated him. Years later, in a Fortune interview, he said his father had threatened to make him pay for private school himself if he could earn his own money. Naveen, for his part, said the aim was for his children to earn privileges and to spend each summer learning something new.
He built a website, then pitched a shoe company to send him free pairs in exchange for ads.
He was born around 1990 in Bellevue, Washington, and raised in Redmond. His parents, Anu and Naveen, were both technology entrepreneurs. He joined his father's road shows at six and started his first company at eleven.
At Wharton he started the Kairos Society, an incubator for young entrepreneurs, in 2008. In 2012 he founded Humin, an address book that sorted contacts by context. It raised $15 million and was sold to Tinder in 2016. Jain stayed on as vice president of product and left in May 2017 to return to Kairos.
What almost nobody connects to the shoes is Bilt. In 2017, Jain has said, he looked at San Francisco startups funding electric scooters while residents struggled with rent, health care and student loans. He called Wharton a factory for bankers and consultants, and argued the best companies start with a founder's own frustrating experience. Rent, about 40 percent of many people's income, built no credit when paid on time. He called that one of the most infuriating experiences for a customer. A profile summary says he and Starwood Capital founder Barry Sternlicht talked it through in 2018.
Bilt launched in 2021, and its first card, with Wells Fargo, came in October 2022. The money rose fast: $200 million at $3.1 billion in January 2024, then $250 million at $10.75 billion in July 2025. About 5.5 million members had signed up by 2026. Forbes put Jain's net worth at $3.4 billion in August 2025.
Then Wells Fargo left. Bilt relaunched its cards in January 2026 with new issuers, and two days after launch Jain revised the housing rewards because members were confused.
When Jain was a boy, a no from his father became a pitch to a shoe company. The rent pitch is the same move at scale: take what people already pay for, and get someone else to fund the reward.