Kartik Venkataraman, is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and founder of two companies. As CTO and Founder of Pelican Imaging, a Silicon Valley Computational Imaging Startup he led the company's focus on multi-view imaging for consumer photography before its acquisition by Xperi in late 2016. The core intellectual property developed here has been widely licensed, becoming a key component in the current generation of mobile cameras. As Founder and CEO of Akasha Imaging, he led the company's development of AI-driven vision systems for robotic automation prior to its acquisition by Intrinsic (an Alphabet bet focused on building a software platform for robotic automation) in 2022. Post acquisition he is now leading Intrinsic's R&D effort in Robotics Perception and Applications, including research and development in Foundation Models for Robotics that are safe, reliable, and robust for production deployments.
Kartik interests include ML and Deep Learning and their applications on vision / graphics for robotics, Light field imaging, imaging hardware including sensors, optics, camera systems, inference and edge architectures, computational imaging, computer vision, and computer graphics. Prior to founding Pelican Imaging, Kartik headed the Computational Camera group at Micron Imaging (Aptina), and held senior research roles at Intel in 3D and medical imaging, where he worked on joint programs with Johns Hopkins Medical School and the Institute for Systems Science in Singapore. Kartik received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California, Santa Cruz, MS in Computer Engineering from University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and B.Tech. (Honors) in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. His contributions to the imaging and computer vision fields include more than a dozen scientific papers in peer reviewed scientific journals and conferences, and over 100 granted U.S. and international patents.
