San Francisco, CA
Email: abhay.venkatesh[at]gmail[dot]com
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Abhay is an AI engineer and researcher. He was an early ML engineer at Anduril, working on autonomy and later on frontier models for national security. Before that he did machine learning research.
Abhay co-founded Anduril’s Frontier AI team, recruited the founding team, and built AI infrastructure supporting work across the company, including training infrastructure used to post-train models for national security applications.
Related programs: Thunderforge, Anduril’s OpenAI partnership, and CDAO’s Edge Data Mesh for generative AI.
Abhay worked directly with CEO Brian Schimpf to co-invent and patent foundational systems for Lattice for Mission Autonomy, which enables teams of autonomous systems to carry out complex missions under human supervision. Lattice for Mission Autonomy has since been flight-tested on Fury (YFQ-44A), Anduril’s aircraft for the U.S. Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program.
Abhay is a key architect of Lattice Command & Control (C2) and a top code contributor to Anduril’s APIs. He architected the tasking APIs, which let operators and software create, route, and track tasks across assets and teams of assets.
RubricRefine: Improving Tool-Use Agent Reliability with Training-Free Pre-Execution Refinement
Will LeVine, Brendan Evers, Sam Saltwick, Abhay Venkatesh
arXiv preprint 2026
paper
Generating Accurate Pseudo-labels in Semi-Supervised Learning and Avoiding Overconfident Predictions via Hermite Polynomial Activations
Vishnu Suresh Lokhande, Songwong Tasneeyapant, Abhay Venkatesh, Sathya N. Ravi, Vikas Singh
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2020
paper |
code
Optimizing Nondecomposable Data Dependent Regularizers via Lagrangian Reparameterization Offers Significant Performance and Efficiency Gains
Sathya N. Ravi, Abhay Venkatesh, Glenn M. Fung, Vikas Singh
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2020
paper
Full publication list on Google Scholar.
Alongside his engineering and research, Abhay angel invests in AI and frontier technology. His investments include Mercor, Factory AI, Saronic, OpenAI, and Anthropic. He has also scouted for Sequoia, Greylock, Index Ventures, and Bain Capital Ventures.
Abhay Venkatesh, Brian W. Schimpf, Elston Tochip, Jared Newman, Joshua John Bennett, Nikhil Reddy, Samuel R. Elie