15 Indian Origin Leaders driving AI Revolution in U.S

Arvind Jain is the Co-founder and CEO of Glean, an AI-powered workplace search and Work AI platform. Glean helps employees find information across company applications and automate tasks using AI, addressing knowledge fragmentation within enterprises. An alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi and the University of Washington, Arvind previously co-founded Rubrik and held leadership roles at Google. Glean was valued at $2.2 billion in early 2024 and reached a $9 billion valuation by March 2025.

Aravind Srinivas is the CEO and co-founder of Perplexity AI. Born in Chennai, India, he is known for co-founding this AI-powered “answer engine” that provides direct, cited responses to user queries. Aravind holds dual degrees from IIT Madras and pursued a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His extensive background includes research roles at OpenAI, Google, and DeepMind. Perplexity AI, founded in 2022, was valued at $9 billion as of March 2025.

Ashwin Sreenivas, hailing from Kochi, Kerala, is the Founder of Campfire, a U.S.-based AI startup located in San Francisco. Campfire uses AI to help companies manage and build large online communities by providing insights gathered from platforms like Twitter, Slack, and Discord. An alumnus of Stanford University, Ashwin was recognized on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in 2022 for his work with Campfire. His previous AI-based startup, Helia, which developed software for enterprise security, was acquired by Scale AI. Campfire is a venture-backed company with notable investors.

Ashutosh Saxena is the Co-founder, CEO & Chief AI Officer of Caspar.AI. Caspar.AI focuses on Embodied GenAI for pro-active healthcare, providing over 20 health markers. Dr. Saxena received his Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from Stanford University, where he studied with Andrew Ng. He was also an accomplished professor at Cornell University. He is recognized as a Microsoft Fellow, Sloan Fellow, and recipient of the MIT TR35 award. His expertise lies in Agentic AI for Autonomous Systems like robots, cars, and healthcare. Caspar.AI was named among the Top 100 AI Companies by CB Insights. Dr. Saxena also co-founded Katapult, which went public at a $1 billion valuation, and Brain of Things, an AI company for smart homes. His work on large-scale models for robotics received a 10-year test of time award in 2023.

Ashok Elluswamy is an Indian-origin business leader who currently serves as Tesla’s Vice President of AI Software. He is a robotics engineer with extensive experience in computer vision, perception, planning, and control. Mr. Elluswamy pursued his bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering at the College of Engineering Guindy, Chennai, and holds a Master’s in Robotics System Development from Carnegie Mellon University. He has reflected on his Tamil heritage during a recent podcast.

Mr. Elluswamy was the first engineer hired for Tesla’s Autopilot team in June 2014 and has been with the company for 10 years. Elon Musk has publicly praised Mr. Elluswamy for his pivotal role in developing Tesla’s Autopilot technology, stating that without him and the team, Tesla would be just another car company.

Varun Kacholia is also an Author at Eightfold AI. He is described as one of the world’s leaders in search, ranking, and machine-learning. Varun achieved a #2 rank at the Indian Institute of Technology in 2000. He holds a Masters from the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, he led the News Feed team at Facebook and the YouTube Search and Recommendations team at Google. He is recognized with several Google Executive Awards and has accomplished 20+ patents.

Rajat Bhageria is the Founder of Chef Robotics, a San Francisco-based firm. He was born in India and raised in Cincinnati. Chef Robotics aims to automate food service using robots to increase production, enhance consistency, and minimize food waste. The company is nearly three years old and has raised $7.7 million from investors like Kleiner Perkins. Rajat was named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 – Manufacturing & Industry list in 2022. He earned both his Bachelor of Arts/Science and Master of Arts/Science degrees from the University of Pennsylvania.

Mohit Aron is the founder of Cohesity. He previously served as the company’s CEO and chief strategy and technical officer. He has recently transitioned to a “founder emeritus” role. He founded Cohesity in June 2013, establishing it as a data protector and manager. In his current role, he provides strategic and architectural input and participates in external engagements, with a focus on shaping the future of AI and accelerated computing within Cohesity.

Dr. Vishal Sikka is the Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Vianai Systems, a Human-Centered AI platform and products company launched in 2019. Vianai Systems is based in Palo Alto, California. Dr. Sikka is considered one of the world’s leading experts in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. He previously served as the CEO and Managing Director of Infosys from 2014 to 2017. Vianai’s platform, hila, uses generative AI to help C-suite executives gain real-time insights from their data through natural language interactions. TCS is partnering with Vianai to customize the hila platform for various industries.

Varun Mohan is the co-founder and CEO of Windsurf, an AI-powered development environment. Windsurf, formerly known as Codeium, has been used by over 1 million developers in four months. The company underwent two pivots, moving from GPU virtualization infrastructure to its current focus. Varun believes that while AI will generate a large percentage of code, engineering jobs will actually increase. Windsurf gains an edge by training on millions of incomplete code samples.

Shiv Rao, MD is the CEO and Co-Founder of Abridge, a company focused on bringing context and understanding to medical conversations. Dr. Rao is also a practicing cardiologist and faculty member at UPMC’s Heart and Vascular Institute. Abridge records doctor visits, transcribes them, and uses AI to create summaries for patients and physicians. Doctors have reportedly shown positive feedback about Abridge. Abridge secured $12.5M in funding and, as of early 2025, had approximately 50,000 contracted clinicians, partly through a partnership with Kaiser Permanente. The company aims to be part of every medical conversation.

Vipul Ved Prakash is a software engineer and Internet entrepreneur. He was born in New Delhi, India. He is a co-founder of the open-source AI company TogetherAI. Vipul attended St. Stephen’s College, Delhi but dropped out to pursue software design. In India, he co-founded Sense/Net, an Internet privacy company. He is known for creating Vipul’s Razor, an open-source anti-spam system, and was named a top 100 young innovator by MIT Technology Review in 2003 for this work. He worked as an engineer at Napster and co-founded Cloudmark to offer a commercial email security solution based on Vipul’s Razor. In 2007, he co-founded and was CTO of Topsy Labs, which was acquired by Apple for over $200M. After the acquisition, he served as a Director of Engineering at Apple.

Tuhin Srivastava is one of the co-founders and the CEO of Baseten. He co-founded the company at the end of 2019 to solve issues encountered while building machine learning models. Baseten aims to be a general purpose toolkit for data science and ML teams, providing a platform to serve, integrate, design, and ship machine learning applications. The company addresses the challenges teams faced with model deployment, infrastructure, and building UIs. Baseten’s focus has heavily shifted towards making AI inference seamless and scalable, especially after the rise of models like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion. Tuhin previously worked in investment banking before moving into biomedical research using machine learning around 2011-2012. He later became an engineer to support himself as a machine learning engineer.

Manu Chopra is the Co-founder and CEO of Karya. He was born in India and raised in Cincinnati. Manu graduated from Stanford University in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, focusing on artificial intelligence. He also co-founded CS+Social Good at Stanford. Karya, founded as an idea in 2017 and spun out in 2022, is a Hybrid organization that uses AI to provide earning and learning opportunities to low-income communities across the global South, particularly rural Indians. Manu aims to ensure AI works well for these communities and that they are seen as builders, not just beneficiaries. He has been recognized in the TIME 100 Most Influential People in AI, MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35, and Forbes 30 Under 30. He is based in Bengaluru, India.

Shekar Natarajan (Orchestro AI) Shekar Natarajan is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Orchestro.AI. Born and raised in the streets of India, he witnessed the inefficiencies of logistics firsthand. He traveled to the United States with an engineering degree. Shekar has over two decades of experience leading large-scale supply chain transformations at major corporations, including Coca Cola, Walmart, PepsiCo, Disney, and American Eagle Outfitters. He is considered an architect of modern last-mile delivery programs, having worked on initiatives like Walmart’s grocery pilot. He founded Orchestro.AI in 2023 with the vision of building the world’s first open logistics network platform powered by AI. Orchestro.AI utilizes Vertical AI, which is tailored specifically for the supply chain industry, bringing precision and relevance to logistics knowledge. He holds over 150 patents and has been recognized as one of Analytics India Magazine’s Top AI Leaders.