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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wiz Control
Side project
Wiz LED lightbulbs only come with a phone app, and I wanted one for macOS. Swift menu-bar app that drives the bulbs directly over local UDP to control color wheel, color temperature, brightness, and per-bulb presets, with no account and no internet dependency.
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
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.
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 and demoed by Bill Gates.
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.
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
- Generating a Table-of-Contents
S.R.K. Branavan, Pawan Deshpande, Regina Barzilay. ACL.
- Randomized Decoding for Selection-and-Ordering Problems
Pawan Deshpande, Regina Barzilay, David R. Karger. NAACL.
- Inducing Temporal Graphs
Philip Bramsen, Pawan Deshpande, Yoong Keok Lee, Regina Barzilay. EMNLP.
- Finding Temporal Order in Discharge Summaries
Philip Bramsen, Pawan Deshpande, Yoong Keok Lee, Regina Barzilay. AMIA.
- Integer Linear Programming for Selection-and-Ordering Problems
Pawan Deshpande. 2nd Annual CSAIL Student Workshop.
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
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.
Bridging Silicon Valley and India: The Future of Cross-Border Venture Capital
Stanford India Conference · May 10, 2026
Panel at the Stanford India Conference with Jishnu Bhattacharjee (Nexus Venture Partners) and Dr. Nandini Tandon (Aarna Venture Partners), on what cross-border venture capital looks like next.
Your Facebook data is still vulnerable. I know because I made it that way.
Washington Post · April 13, 2018
Op-Ed where I revealed an active vulnerability in Facebook amidst the congressional hearings based on my earlier social network work.
Analysis of how the pandemic caused dramatic data drift in AI models across industries, from Instacart's grocery predictions to Getty Images' computer vision systems.
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.
SaaS Critical Care: How to 2x Renewal Rates
Personal Blog · August 1, 2023
Customer success framework I developed & implemented that led to a doubling of our renewal rates over 9 months.
Interviewed by John McMahon (5x CRO & Board Member of Snowflake) on my framework for reducing churn.
Critical Customer Care Framework: A Simple Methodology for Customer Success
Land and Expand Podcast · February 6, 2025
Interviewed by customer success expert Jay Nathan on my churn reduction framework.
The Content Marketing Pyramid: Create More With Less
Chief Content Officer Magazine · August 24, 2014
Well adopted & extensible framework for repurposing content with 4,800 social shares to date.
Investing
I angel invest in pre-seed and seed AI and B2B companies through Curata Ventures.
$20B in IPO 2021
Toast
Restaurant point of sale system
$1B+ valuation
Upside Foods
Cultivated meat grown from animal cells
$800M valuation
LinkSquares
Contract lifecycle management
Falkonry
Observability & Autmation AI
Customers.ai
Lead intelligence
Rocksalt
Credibility building
Viyaat Agro
Agtech for land cultivation
Puzzle Electronics
Electronics manufacturing
ResiDesk
AI command center for residential real estate
Paladin Drones
Drones as first responders
Naftiko
Open source integration fabric
Solid
Vibe-coding to production
Pensar
AI vulnerability management
Prox
AI co-worker for logistics
Anthropic
AI frontier models
Contra
Designer marketplace
Otto
Automated systemic reviews
Visible Health
Chronic illness health tracking
Foundry Robotics
Robotics manufacturing
Inheritance AI
Video-to-behavior AI for robotics training
Protera Health
Virtual care for musculoskeletal pain
Hermetiq
Software build management
Rec League
Social sharing
Stealth
Robots
Stealth
AI-enhanced healthcare
Stealth
Voice-to-text
Scale Angels
Scale AI employee & alum fund
Stage 2 Capital
B2B SaaS GTM venture fund
Anansi Capital
AI-buyout fund
Stage 2 Catalyst
B2B SaaS Seed fund & accelerator
Sweet Spot Capital
Solo GP early-stage fund