About

I’m CEO and Co-Founder of Neural Nurture, an applied AI lab that turns NLP and computer-vision research into products people use. Our first product, Tiaris, is an AI flight-search assistant live in the US and India: travelers describe a trip in plain English, and Tiaris searches, ranks and explains the best options. We’re also building privacy-first AI tools, with 250+ people already on the waitlist. I co-founded the company with Dr. Dinesh Daultani, who leads computer vision and previously worked at Woven by Toyota and Rakuten.

Recent: In September 2026 I joined 30 leaders from industry and academia at the HEV CXO Bridge roundtable in Indore on building India’s AI talent pipeline. [Read more]

Investors and partners: reach me on LinkedIn.

Background

I’ve spent over a decade shipping machine learning at scale, across research labs and some of the largest consumer platforms in Asia.

• Rakuten, Group Manager, NLP (2021 to 2023): Led a 15-scientist NLP group across E-Commerce, Finance and Travel. Delivered a keyword ad-bidding optimizer for external search engines and a knowledge-graph-based product attribute extractor, and contributed to Rakuten AI 7B, the company’s in-house Japanese LLM.
• Amazon Japan, Sr. Technical Program Manager, Applied ML (2019 to 2021): Ran ML programs across 13 countries. Co-invented a sequence-to-sequence ad-generation system for paid search, and shipped a neural Japanese tokenizer into six business use cases.
• Rakuten, Head of NLP and Deep Learning Researcher (2017 to 2019): Built a deep-learning fraud detection platform for Rakuten Card, user-retargeting models for the travel business, and an unsupervised summarization system for investment analysts. Helped establish the Rakuten India research lab and co-founded the AI Trainers program.
• NEC Central Research Laboratories, Researcher (2014 to 2017): Developed deep-learning algorithms for NEC’s SX-ACE supercomputer that cut CNN inference time by up to 95%. Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley’s Swarm Lab (2015), leading an IoT project on vertical mobility.

I hold a PhD in NLP from the Tokyo Institute of Technology (now Institute of Science Tokyo, 2025), where I worked with Prof. Naoaki Okazaki on using language models to judge whether sentences are natural and well-formed. I also hold an M.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Delhi and a B.E. in Computer Science from TCET Indore. My work has produced six granted patents in the US and Japan and peer-reviewed papers in NLP and deep learning.

See my research, patents and talks or my full CV.