Shruti Merchant is an entrepreneur and business executive. She is the co-founder and CEO of HubHaus, a housing community that provides working professionals with long-term, shared housing. ^[8]

Merchant was raised in Fremont, California. ^[0]

She is currently part of an 8-year early admission medical program.

She finished the first half of it at Saint Bonaventure University, graduating with a Bachelor's degree in Biology. ^[7]

She was also enrolled in a direct-entry medical program with George Washington University's medical school. ^[7]

Merchant's entrepreneurial career began in the spring of 2014.

After moving to Silicon Valley, she founded an ecommerce dropshipper lifestyle business that predicted top-selling beauty trends called Merchant Ventures. ^[7]

That summer, she also founded a company called Optobeam, which built and distributed virtual reality headsets. ^[7]

When she was in her early 20's, Shruti Merchant had trouble find affordable housing, or even a community with whom she could socialize.

Athe time, she didn't know anyone and ended up meeting up with someone on Craigslist with whom she shared a single-family home. After getting along very well, they decided to start their own 7-bedroom house together. ^[4] [8]

After this experience, she noticed that despite shared housing being a clear solution, there were few good shared houses with real communities, due to the difficulties involved in setup.

^[5]She even heard that the Director of Stanford University School of Medicine that housing in the valley was so expensive and competitive that residents were turning down Stanford. ^[6]

As a solution, she and Kerry Jones created HubHaus for people who do not have a place to live and/or a sense of community. ^[6]

In November 2017, it was announced that Merchant and her co-founder Kerry Jones were listed in Forbes' 30 Under 30's 'Consumer Technology' sub-list. ^[9]