Builder, founder, angel.

I build machine learning products. I founded Curata and ran it for a decade, then led product at Domino Data Lab, Scale AI, Linea Labs, and Galileo, where I shipped MLOps, active learning on the edge, and LLM evaluation. Before that: MIT CSAIL, Google, Microsoft, and a few startups. I invest in AI and B2B founders. I write about AI safety, cybersecurity, and the geopolitics of frontier technology on the blog.

See my work ·Investing

AI RESEARCHER

Top AI thesis & patent filings

FOUNDER & CEO

3 products. 1,000+ customers.

AI PRODUCT LEADER

MLOps, fleet learning & LLM evals

ANGEL INVESTOR

25+ investments & multiple unicorns

What I've shipped

You may not have heard of Curata, but you've heard of its 1,000+ customers

For 10+ years, I built a content marketing platform trusted by 20% of the Fortune 100.

Founded

Curata CCS

Curata

Content curation software for B2B marketing teams to discover, curate, and share third-party content, built on a data pipeline for crawling, boilerplate and entity extraction, near-duplicate detection, semi-supervised classification, and per-customer relevance ranking across millions of documents. Wrote a decent portion of the code base.

Curata CMP

Curata

Enterprise content marketing platform for planning, producing, and measuring content, with full-funnel analytics across CRM, marketing automation, CMS, and social.

Curata Reader

Curata

Multi-device Google Reader alternative, named by CNET one of the top 5 feed readers. Launched in 60 days with 17M feed subscriptions in the first three weeks.

CNET coverage

Led product

Fleet Data Engine

Scale AI

Captures data from drone, robot, and autonomous-vehicle fleets to improve ML models in the field, under on-device compute and bandwidth constraints. Designed the architecture across an on-edge embedded SDK and a cloud API, and coded the initial MVP.

Architecture docs

Domino Model Monitor

Domino Data Lab

Automated data and model quality drift monitoring for machine learning models in production. Integrated acquired product into larger product suite. Only product to date where I didn't actually touch code.

Product

LLM evaluation platform

Galileo

Evaluation, observability, and guardrails for LLM applications. Launched easy-to-use self-serve PLG version transitioning from on-prem to multi-tenant SaaS.

Product

Selected recent side projects

Lumina

Side project

Klipsch Promedia Lumina speakers only come with control apps for phones and Windows, but I wanted one for macOS. Reverse-engineered the Bluetooth LE protocol and wrote a native Swift menu-bar app for volume, EQ, sound modes, subwoofer gain, and the RGB lighting.

GitHub

JevGPT

Side project

ChatGPT-style chat app where every word is a multiple-choice question. Jev, TypeSafe AI's System One model, only picks among options, so I made it write: each step asks Jev which of ~1,800 words comes next, then has it re-rank the top picks as full sentences. Next.js, with streaming, per-word probabilities, and a self-grading eval.

Live demo GitHub

Karmic

Side project

Lets consumers see and compensate for the social and environmental impact of their spending. Built it end to end with user interviews, Figma prototypes, and the app itself in React, Python, Postgres, Docker, and Kubernetes. Got angel investor commitments, but abandoned because of my own low market conviction.

Early career

Machine Transliteration

Google

Machine transliteration for typing Indic languages with a Latin keyboard. Built the first working prototype in Kannada and Hindi; shipped in Google Input Tools, now across Google products in 120+ languages with 100M+ app installs. Featured in the New York Times.

Product Patent filing

People You May Know

Microsoft

Building a social graph meant manually adding connections. Co-invented the algorithm that recommends connections from messages, email, and calendars, as part of Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server.

Patent filing

P2P Detection & Blocking

IMlogic

Detected and disrupted illegal peer-to-peer file sharing inside corporate networks. Built the product from scratch in 3 weeks. Adopted by 2,000+ companies across 22 industries through a freemium motion.

Press release

Published Work

Papers

Decoding Algorithms for Complex Natural Language Tasks
Pawan Deshpande; thesis supervisor Regina Barzilay. M.Eng. thesis, MIT CSAIL.
Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation Prize
Charles & Jennifer Johnson Award for Outstanding M.Eng. Thesis in Computer Science
Paper Award announcement
Generating a Table-of-Contents
S.R.K. Branavan, Pawan Deshpande, Regina Barzilay. ACL.
Paper Code & data Slides
Randomized Decoding for Selection-and-Ordering Problems
Pawan Deshpande, Regina Barzilay, David R. Karger. NAACL.
Paper Slides
Inducing Temporal Graphs
Philip Bramsen, Pawan Deshpande, Yoong Keok Lee, Regina Barzilay. EMNLP.
Paper
Finding Temporal Order in Discharge Summaries
Philip Bramsen, Pawan Deshpande, Yoong Keok Lee, Regina Barzilay. AMIA.
Paper
Integer Linear Programming for Selection-and-Ordering Problems
Pawan Deshpande. 2nd Annual CSAIL Student Workshop.
Paper

Patent filings

Machine Learning for Transliteration
US 2008/0221866 · Google
Lalitesh Katragadda, Pawan Deshpande, Anupama Dutta, Nitin Arora
Systems and Methods for Recommendation of Personal Network
US 2006/0074932 · Microsoft
Bryant Fong, James Hilke, Venkatesh Veeraraghavan, Pawan Deshpande

Book chapters

Race and Colorism in Education
Sailaja N. Joshi, Murali Balaji, and Pawan Deshpande

Writing and Interviews

National Security

Why We Should Hack Ourselves Before Someone Else Does

The National Interest · August 24, 2026

AI has erased the cost barrier to constant security testing. Without a legal incentive to act on what it finds, companies will keep waiting for the breach that forces their hand.

Cybersecurity

National Security

America Lost India. Without a Trade Deal, It May Lose Its Next War Too

The National Interest · September 17, 2025

Analysis of how India's deepening ties with Russia and China could undermine America's industrial and strategic capabilities in future conflicts, emphasizing the need for renewed trade talks.

Geopolitics

Trade

Strategy

AI & Startups

How to Spot Churn Signals and Level-Up Your Customer Success Organization

Stage 2 Capital · February 19, 2025

Guest post sharing the Critical Care Framework that transformed customer success from reactive support into a proactive system for reducing churn and driving growth.

SaaS

Customer Success