This is the first in a series of Ruby Runway Spotlights, celebrating the founders who took part in the inaugural Ruby Runway Showcase at RubyConf 2026. Each spotlight is a chance to hear directly from the builders turning Ruby into real, live businesses, and to cheer them on as they keep going.
Tell us your name, your startup, and what it does in one or two sentences.
I am Paresh Sharma, founder of Viveture. Viveture connects pet owners with local sitters for pet care services.
What problem are you solving, and who feels it most? How does your Ruby-powered solution change things for them?
Both sides feel the pain, just differently.
Pet owners search for a sitter and get results sorted by who charges the most, because the platform takes a percentage of every booking. A more expensive sitter means a bigger cut for the platform. The incentive has nothing to do with who is actually the best fit for your pet.
Sitters feel it on every single booking. They lose 20 to 40% of their earnings to the platform on every transaction, no exceptions. They can lower their prices to stay competitive, but that just means earning less while the platform still takes its cut. There is no way to win inside that model.
Viveture has no skin in that game. We do not take a cut from any booking, so we have no reason to surface expensive sitters over good ones. Sitters keep everything they earn. Rankings reflect what actually matters: quality and fit. Both sides finally have a platform that is working for them, not against them.
Ruby has a reputation for developer happiness and elegant code. How has building with Ruby shaped the way you think about your product?
Rails pushed me toward opinions, and that turned out to be a product advantage. Convention over configuration is not just a development principle, it shapes how you approach product decisions too. You stop over-engineering and start shipping things that work. I found myself making cleaner calls because Rails made the technical path obvious, which freed up mental space for the harder questions: what does the sitter actually need on this screen? What creates trust between a pet owner and someone they have never met?
There is also something about the Ruby community that attracts builders who care about craft. That ethos shaped how I approached the product. I wanted every interaction to feel considered, not just functional.
What would you say to another Ruby developer sitting on a startup idea right now, wondering if they should go for it?
Just ship that idea you have been sitting on. What you are embarrassed to show people is still better than the idea that never launched. I built Viveture as a solo founder with no co-founder and no outside funding, and it is live on the App Store today. Not because I had some unfair advantage, but because Rails made it possible for one person to build something real.
The Ruby community will help. RubyConf, local meetups, open source maintainers who actually respond to issues. That does not exist everywhere. If you have an idea and you know Rails, you are already more equipped than you think.
What's your origin story? Tell us who you are, what your startup does, and the moment you knew Ruby was the right foundation to build it on.
I started Viveture because I was genuinely fed up using existing pet care apps. When I searched for a sitter, the results were sorted by who charged the most, not who was the best fit for my dog. The whole experience felt broken, and I wanted to build something that actually put the right sitter in front of the right pet owner.
I chose Rails because I was building alone and needed to move fast. Booking flows, real-time messaging, background check integrations, Stripe billing, push notifications, all as a single developer. Rails let me ship a production-ready marketplace in under a year. The ecosystem just works: Stripe has a gem, SendGrid has a gem, Sidekiq is battle-tested, Heroku deploys are trivial. Ruby got out of my way and let me focus on the product.
Find Viveture:
Website: viveture.com Instagram: @viveture TikTok: @viveture
Viveture was one of the founding companies featured in the Ruby Runway Showcase at RubyConf 2026. Stay tuned for more spotlights from this inaugural cohort of Ruby-built startups.