Akash Garg

Akash Garg is an angel investor and the CTO of MoonPay. He is also the founder and former CTO of the social network Hi5.

Garg immigrated to the United States when he was a child. He was raised in the Midwest region. He attended Stanford University, where he studied computer science and earned both a bachelor’s and master’s degree.

Hi5 was a social networking website founded in 2003 by Garg and Ramu Yalamanchi. It was quickly profitable and achieved significant popularity in countries across Latin America, Europe, and Asia. Fifty million members were registered on the site by 2007; most were located outside of the United States. At a point, Hi5's site traffic was even higher than its competitor, Facebook, which was launched around the same time. Hi5 raised $20 million in a Series A round in 2007. However, the site had been relying on banner ads for all of its revenue, and the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2008 resulted in a necessary decrease in advertisement spending, thus reducing its revenue. User growth began slowing around the same time.

Hi5 became focused on new ways to increase revenue and began rolling out new features that were similar to existing features of other popular websites and social networks like Facebook and Tencent. Hi5 started offering virtual goods for sale, along with a virtual currency used to purchase said virtual goods. Games were also launched. Nevertheless, most of Hi5's revenue still came from advertisements.

The company raised $3 million in debt funding in March 2009 and laid off 50 percent of its staff in the same month. After exploring additional revenue opportunities, Hi5 shifted from social media to social gaming. It was around this time that Garg decided to leave the company. Hi5 continued its push into social gaming, but its success was eventually overtaken by Facebook and other emerging platforms like Instagram. Hi5 remains online today, but only a fraction of its 100 million users are active.

After leaving Hi5, Garg became the CTO at competing social network Bebo in July 2010. He left in June 2011 to join Twitter.

Garg joined Twitter in June 2011 as an engineer on its Platform team. In September 2015, Garg resigned as the senior director of the engineering, growth, and international team. He left to join the ridesharing app Uber.

Garg joined Uber in September 2015. As the director of engineering, he managed all of the technology products used by the company's drivers, including onboarding and compliance tasks. Garg left Uber in May 2018 to join Afterpay as the CTO and vice president of product.

Garg served as the founding CTO of Afterpay US, where he led the technology and product teams. He left Afterpay when it was acquired by Block in 2022.

Garg became MoonPay's CTO in July 2022. MoonPay is a cryptocurrency payment service.

Garg is an investor with Observe.ai. He is a mentor at 500 Global and i/o Ventures. Garg's investments include Eventador.io, Slide, NoiseToys, Nuzzel, and EzCred.