Building an end-to-end continuous security company for ML Models. Researched 3D Shape representation and generation under Olodapo Afulani and Shankar Sastry at BAIR. Worked with Nicholas Carlini on a research project involving evaluation of adversarial example detectors at Google. Published at ICLR 2022. Berkeley M.E.T.

Alberto is a from Puebla MX, grew up in North Carolina. Fluent in Spanish + Portuguese. Interested in Venture, particularly the intersection of ML and Life Sciences (Therapeutics). He is working with CLEAR this fall as an Post-MBA Intern.

Stanford PhD, advised by Chelsea Finn. Focused on NLP and ML. Member of BAIR lab during undergrad program at Cal Berkeley advised by Sergey Levin and Dan Klein.

Stanford Postdoc ML Researcher interested in Generative Models and Time Series, Advised by Percy Liang. University of Washington PhD & Ms in CS.

Soumya is working on his PhD at Stanford. He is a member of the Kundaje Lab, his research focuses on the genetic and molecular basis of neurodegenerative /psychiatric disorders.

Walmart Labs reporting group, working in Big Data. Stanford MSCS with AI Concentration. Explainable AI at Lenovo – using language models to classify customer support cases. Interested in AI, Big Data and Web3. Talented musician!

Working at Google AI as a Research Scientist. Stanford PhD focused on NLP and Health Care Applications. Advised by Chris Re on some projects related to Non-Euclidean Machine Learning. Worked on RoBerta while at FAIR, Xuedong Huang’s team at MSFT.

Former member of the Stanford Open Virtual Assistant Lab, worked under Monica Lam on Genie, OSS privacy preserving virtual assistant platform. SWE specializing in ML/NLP. Stanford PhD. ML Researcher at Bardeen.

Okan works in the research group led by Professor Amin Arbabian in the EECS department at Stanford University. His work covers circuit and system design for biomedical, sensing, and Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

Okan is working at the intersection of ML/Sensors/Robotics. Stanford PhD. From Turkish Capital Ankara.  

Currently a Stanford Post-doc researcher in the ILIAD lab. Research interest lies at the intersection of ML and Human-Robot Interaction. FAIR AI Resident.

Mbogo has aspirations to be a company builder. University of Michigan BE, CS. 3x Varsity Letter Winner in Lacrosse. SWE at Sofi and Sleek. Interesting intersection of CS and Sales Experience + Finance.

Infrastructure Engineer at Stripe. Investor at Contrary Capital, Kleiner Perkins Engineering Fellow.

JPM Chase. First Generation College Student, finished AA degree before graduating HS. MS in Biomedical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon. BS in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

Meet Asim. 👋

Asim Hirji, one of our DeepTech Fellows, has been part of a successful exit as a Founding Engineer and may have his own start-up in the works. 

“There were always ups and downs when getting started on AccessBell. It was like raising a baby,” Asim says of his first start-up experience. Asim assisted in building their B2B integrated video software – a solution built to bolster telemedicine and remote healthcare services. Having a front row seat from beginning to exit at this successful start-up inspired entrepreneurship in Asim. “I’m more ingrained in entrepreneurship now. I used to be very corporate and software focused. For now, I am maintaining strong relationships in Silicon Valley and will see where it takes me.” 

Asim just finished his Masters in Computer Science at Georgia Tech and has an impressive engineering resume. 

CLEAR Fellowship Reflection

“I’ve been able to talk through strategy, get help reaching out to firms for fundraising, and gain access to a supportive group through this Fellowship. It’s been very eye-opening looking at DeepTech through the VC lens versus the engineer or founder perspective.” 

Advice from Asim 

“You’ll hear no a lot more than you’ll hear yes. Don’t get let down by that.”

Meet Jiaming. 👋

Jiaming Song’s interest in DeepTech was sparked by a Machine Learning advisor at Duke who introduced him to ML research opportunities. Now Jiaming is an ML/AI research scientist at NVIDIA, has a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford, and is part of our CLEAR Ventures DeepTech Fellowship. 

Jiaming has over 45 publications under his belt and has experience in various ML/AI research projects – from positions at Microsoft Asia, Facebook, Duke, and postdoctoral at Stanford. 

The DeepTech topics that Fellows are presenting to the group, such as AI safety, have inspired new research ideas for Jiaming. “At NVIDIA, I have a lot more resources at my disposal to execute research, think of experiments, and actually implement those ideas.” 

CLEAR Fellowship Reflection

While Jiaming has clear expertise in ML/AI research, he wanted to learn more about what was happening in DeepTech outside of his research area. “This diverse network of Fellows has opened me up to VCs, and startups, and made me think about my career development long-term.”  

Advice from Jiaming 

“Get your hands dirty. Hands-on experience is invaluable.” 

Meet Sunwoo. 👋

Sunwoo Lee has been busy in her Co-Founder role at Cromatic while participating in the CLEAR Ventures DeepTech Fellowship. Sunwoo has recently announced that Cromatic raised $1M in their pre-seed round (congratulations!). 

Prior to founding Cromatic, Sunwoo had internships at two early-stage B2B startups while pursuing her Bachelor’s and Master’s degree at Stanford. “I enjoy the early startup space because of how much impact you can have on the company, the product, the branding, etc. My voice matters when I’m on a small startup team and that matters to me.” During her senior year, she had her first co-founder experience, and while this startup didn’t stick it taught her the thrill and pace of the startup space and what it took to be a founder. 

Sunwoo and a Stanford PhD friend came together to start Cromatic three months ago and soon after convinced another classmate to serve as their CTO. “All of our backgrounds blended nicely to make this solution. The problem we are trying to solve deserved each of our expertise – in bio, AI, and SaaS.” Cromatic’s mission is to make meaningful research possible without physical labs. “With the virtualization of life-sciences research, outsourcing R&D has become more important than ever. But innovation in the space has been slow—scientists still face significant challenges finding and working with outsourcing partners that detract from the science.” 

CLEAR Fellowship Reflection 

“Chris Rust’s seminar to the Fellows about hiring and recruiting couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. It was exactly what I needed because we were hiring at Cromatic. He gave great advice and insights about hiring the right talent to help your startup grow.” 

Advice from Sunwoo

“The team is always going to be stronger than the individual so you need to find the right co-founder, the right team, and unlock everyone’s potential. They are going to be the reason you are excited and inspired to work hard.” 

Meet Aman. 👋

Aman Kishore always asks himself “how much impact can I make?” and that question has guided his work on Autonomous Vehicles at NVIDIA to launching his start-up Mirage. We are glad to have Aman in our inaugural CLEAR Ventures DeepTech Fellowship. 

Aman saw his work on Autonomous Vehicle Perception at NVIDIA as a chance to save hundreds of thousands of human lives each year. Aman helped grow the synthetic data NVIDIA team from 3 to 8 people to help improve AV. But he couldn’t ignore the severe limitations he was witnessing with the computer vision data pipeline. 

He saw the bottleneck that perception engineers were constantly facing because of the time it takes to make real progress on computer vision applications. “If the quality of the data isn’t high, the model will not improve. It’s a huge challenge to fill in failures and edge cases to improve models.” Aman wanted to solve this problem to move the industry forward faster. *Enter Mirage.* 

Aman’s main vision with Mirage is to accelerate the development of groundbreaking technologies by speeding up the data pipeline. The platform supplements weak points in synthetic data automatically so months of effort from an engineer is virtually removed. “The direct impact is that robotics, autonomous vehicles, AR, VR, drones, and other technologies can actually come to market. It feels like no end is in sight for these technologies because iterations are so slow. With Mirage, you can accelerate these applications.” 

From the CLEAR team, congratulations on launching Mirage! 

CLEAR Fellowship Reflection

“This Fellowship reinforces entrepreneurship. Being a first time founder is challenging because there’s so much you don’t know. You have to jump off the cliff. This didn’t feel so daunting because CLEAR is DeepTech focused so they can provide hands-on help with what I’m building and working on. And the introductions to other founders and VCs have been extremely valuable.”  

 Advice from Aman 

“Be shameless in your networking. Meet as many people as possible and help others because you never know what help you’ll need in the future.” 

Meet Daniel. 👋

Daniel Bashir is an integral part of our inaugural CLEAR Ventures DeepTech Fellowship. He brings a unique perspective to our program from his research at Harvey Mudd in applied Deep Learning, internship as an Applied Scientist at Amazon & current role as an ML Engineer at a Stealth Startup. 

While research and technical work are part of Daniel’s typical day-to-day life, the social impact and ethics of AI interest him too. Daniel has the opportunity to explore these subjects through his role as an Editor at The Gradient where he interviews AI researchers and practitioners on topics such as common sense, moral reasoning, and consciousness in AI. 

In addition to exploring ethical and responsible AI, Daniel is enjoying his first experience as an operator at a leading Startup in the Valley. “There are really no boundaries when you are at a startup. Your days always look different and you’re encouraged to jump around teams and projects to keep things moving forward. This environment might not be for everyone, but I’ve loved getting to learn by working on projects that I would not have been able to otherwise.”

CLEAR Fellowship Reflection

Daniel has always been interested in startups and entrepreneurship as a way to make an impact in DeepTech. “This Fellowship has been a great way to expose myself to startups, see what it looks like to be a founder, and learn more about the VC industry.”

Advice from Daniel

“Be flexible, adaptable, and willing to go out into the world, try things, and figure out what works for you.”

Meet Nkechi. 👋

Nkechi Iregbulem is an early stage investor at 24VC with an impressive portfolio of companies such as Resourcely, Kasheesh, and 15+ others. We’ve enjoyed bringing Nkechi into the DeepTech space from her Fintech background in the CLEAR Ventures Fellowship. 

While Nkechi has always been deeply immersed in Fintech, the explosion of Web3 sparked her interest in the DeepTech space. From an investor perspective, she’s learned through the Fellowship that it takes a long time to get ML into production so companies that accelerate the productivity of ML models are very compelling to her. “This has opened the doors for me to invest more into DeepTech.” 

CLEAR Fellowship Reflection

“I’ve used this opportunity to learn about topics such as AI and ML that I didn’t have much familiarity with. If I wanted to invest in DeepTech, I now know what questions to ask founders. It’s so important to be knowledgeable, ask the right questions, and not take everything that founders say at face value in order to make smart investments.” 

Advice from Nkechi 

“Be open to learning and be a student of life.” 

Meet Kevin. 👋

Kevin Lu has had a fascination with AI since high school so it’s no surprise that he now is an AI resident at Meta and is beginning his PhD studies in Robotics and Decision-Making at Stanford this fall. It has been a pleasure having Kevin in our inaugural class of DeepTech Fellows. 

Kevin combines his AI knowledge with his engineering sense in his role at Meta. “There is so much creation in this field. It excites me how much we can accomplish with DeepLearning.” 

Come fall, Kevin commences his PhD studies and is excited to explore DeepLearning topics and ideas (with freedom and depth!). “This is going to be a great opportunity to learn new things and work more long-term on projects.”   

CLEAR Fellowship Reflection

“The CLEAR Fellowship is teaching me to be prepared for opportunities and capitalize on them. It’s been a pleasure meeting like-minded people and getting an inside look at Venture Capital.” 

Advice from Kevin

“There are so many resources out there now. If you’re interested in the AI space, this is a great time to self-study online to get a foot in the door. I self-studied code and the basics of AI in high school and was able to improve on these skills with formal education and research mentors.” 

About Me:
Hi, my name is Charles, I’m currently a first-year MBA student at Chicago Booth and originally from the Bay Area. I attended the University of Michigan where I studied Computer Science and Mathematics. Prior to Booth, I was a Forward Deployed Software Engineer at Palantir Technologies based in Palo Alto, CA. I worked as Technical Lead under our Business Development umbrella on Palantir’s deployment projects for US and international commercial clients. I worked with client businesses in energy, cyber & physical security, transportation, consulting, manufacturing, and telecommunication.

I’ve been interning with Clear Ventures since the start of 2022. I am focused on our open source and AI+X investment portfolio, and perform research and portfolio services work.

In my free time, I enjoy playing soccer, running, and learning about new products and technologies.

Hi, my name is Srishti and I’m a first year MBA student at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Prior to Booth, I was working as a data scientist at Spotify. I’m very excited about applications of AI in the future of work and Web 3.0. Looking forward to meeting you all!

About Me:
I’m a first-year MBA student at Chicago Booth who calls Singapore and New York home. I currently work as a product manager at a seed-funded networking platform bringing professional communities together. Prior to Booth, I worked in portfolio management at BlackRock in New York and a biotech VC in Palo Alto. In my free time, I enjoy painting, darkroom photo developing, and running.

I’m currently leading the largest annual technology conference at Booth (TechCon), with a focus on web3 and responsible AI for this year’s TechCon. Having been a classically trained painter, I am also very interested in AI’s applications in art and how NFT could be used to empower artists and democratize the art industry. Looking forward to meeting everyone!

About Me:
Hi Everyone! I’m Jay, currently based out of Los Angeles but originally from Princeton, New Jersey. I graduated from UCLA three years ago and have since been working at FTI Consulting, focused on Media & Entertainment M&A Advisory. My specific interest in venture capital and entrepreneurship arose during my data analytics-related projects at work. At FTI, I built several data processing products and data warehousing mechanisms to enhance internal efficiency. Eventually, I had the experience of successfully pitching and selling these products to clients, which was thoroughly fulfilling. My particular interests for future projects center around the intersection of web3 and media platforms. My non-professional interests include sci-fi/fantasy, playing guitar, investing, and camping.