Vijay Daultani

Vijay Daultani

CEO & Co-Founder @ Neural Nurture

Curriculum Vitae

Download CV (PDF) (updated Oct 2026)

Education

CEO & Co-Founder at Neural Nurture (May 2025 to Present)

  • Company: Co-founded Neural Nurture, an applied AI lab building NLP and computer-vision products, with Dr. Dinesh Daultani.

  • Tiaris: Launched an AI flight-search assistant, live in the US and India, that turns plain-English trip requests into ranked, explained flight recommendations.

  • Privacy-first AI: Building AI tools that protect user privacy by default; 250+ people on the waitlist.

  • Research & Speaking: Lead the company’s research direction, workshops and consulting, and deliver keynotes on AI research in India.

Group Manager, NLP at Rakuten (Oct 2021 to Jul 2023)

  • Global NLP Solutions Leadership: Led a 15-scientist team to deliver NLP solutions across E-Commerce, Finance, and Travel domains, resulting in a 10% improvement in project delivery efficiency.

  • Keyword Advertisement Optimization: Spearheaded a bidding strategy optimization project for external search engines, leading to a 1.5% increase in conversion rate (CVR).

  • Knowledge Graph for Attribute Extraction: Initiated and drove the development of a Knowledge Graph system to extract product attributes, enhancing data accuracy for downstream applications on the E-Commerce platform.

  • Large Language Model Development: Contributed to building Rakuten’s in-house state-of-the-art Japanese 7B Large Language Model.

Sr. Technical Program Manager, Applied ML at Amazon (Aug 2019 to Sep 2021)

  • Team Leadership: Directed a cross-functional team of 7 scientists to design and deploy NLP solutions.

  • Global Cross-Functional Collaboration: Built and maintained cross-functional collaborations across 13 countries, aligning technical teams and business stakeholders to enhance global project coordination and synergy.

  • End-to-End Program Ownership: Led full-cycle program execution, from idea conception through development, QA and delivery, resulting in a 7% improvement in overall execution efficiency.

  • Automated Ad Generation: Invented sequence-to-sequence machine learning algorithms for automated ad content generation in paid channels (e.g., Google), boosting conversion rates by 2%.

  • Lexicon-Free Japanese Tokenizer: Led the development of a lexicon-free tokenizer for Japanese text, integrating it into six business use cases and significantly enhancing text processing capabilities.

Head of NLP / Deep Learning Researcher at Rakuten (Feb 2017 to Jul 2019)

  • Leadership & Strategy: Promoted from Deep Learning Researcher to Head of NLP in 2018, driving major data science initiatives across the Asia-Pacific region while reporting to the CDO.

  • Fraud Detection Platform: Developed a deep learning-based fraud detection system for credit card transactions, introducing an optimized sequence representation for RNNs, resulting in a 14.5% improvement in detection accuracy.

  • Patent & Innovation in Text Summarization: Invented and patented an unsupervised text summarization algorithm, enabling new summarization features for news and customer calls in finance and telecom domains.

  • Research Lab & Talent Development: Helped establish Rakuten India’s research lab, recruited senior AI leadership, and co-founded the AI Trainers group to mentor and upskill machine learning talent across teams.

Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley (Nov to Dec 2015)

  • Smart Mobility Decision System: I led a multidisciplinary team on the Smart Mobility Decision System project in collaboration with the Swarm Lab. I developed a system that offered optimal recommendations for users choosing between elevators, stairs, and escalators, enhancing decision-making efficiency by 20%. I also managed project timelines and deliverables, ensuring successful and timely completion.

Researcher at NEC Central Research Laboratories (Oct 2014 to Feb 2017)

  • Hybrid Deep Learning for High-Performance Computing: Invented a hybrid convolution algorithm (SXDNN) for deep learning, implemented on NEC’s SX-ACE Supercomputer, reducing inference time by 65% to 95% for state-of-the-art CNN models.

  • Compiler Optimization for Instruction Selection: Developed and patented an algorithm for optimal instruction selection in compilers, achieving up to 1.25× acceleration in program execution.

  • Performance Optimization for Biometric Systems: Designed novel algorithms and data structures to enhance biometric application performance, resulting in a 2× speedup.

Teaching Assistant at IIT Delhi (Jul 2012 to Jul 2014)

  • CSL 201: Data Structures: Assisted in conducting lab sessions, evaluated assignments and answer scripts, and supported students through viva and demonstrations.

  • CSL 861: Special Topics in Hardware Systems: Supported course delivery through evaluations and demonstrations, contributing to student understanding of advanced hardware concepts.

  • CSL 332/632: Introduction to Database Systems: Conducted labs, graded assignments and exams, and facilitated vivas to reinforce core database principles and practical skills.