# Kartikesh Mishra

> Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer at Lamina AI (YC). MIT EECS M.Eng. ('25) in AI/ML, MIT B.S. ('24) in Computer Science & Engineering and Mathematics. Researcher in Vision-Language Navigation, Reinforcement Learning, and Applied Mathematics.

## Overview
Kartikesh Mishra is the Co-Founder and CTO of Lamina AI, a Y Combinator-backed company building the visualization layer for AI to bring visual explanation everywhere text is today. Previously, he was a software engineer at Abacus AI working on deep research agents at scale (2M+ users) and a founding engineer at Infinirate building distributed real-time agent infrastructure.

He earned his Master of Engineering in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (AI/ML) and dual Bachelor of Science degrees in Computer Science & Engineering and Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At MIT CSAIL's Distributed Robotics Lab under Prof. Daniela Rus, he authored his thesis on compositional vision-language navigation for autonomous drones with zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. He also conducted research in RL-based inverse imaging solvers at MIT EECS and mechanistic interpretability / ordinal rank probing at the Tegmark AI Safety Group.

## Key Facts
- **Name:** Kartikesh Mishra
- **Current Role:** Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Lamina AI, Inc. (YC)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Education:**
  - M.Eng. in Computer Science (AI/ML), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2025)
  - B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2024)
  - B.S. in Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2024)
- **Research Areas:** Vision-Language Navigation (VLN), Reinforcement Learning, Multimodal Foundation Models, Inverse Imaging, Mechanistic Interpretability, Applied Mathematics
- **Awards & Honors:**
  - International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO 2019) Honorable Mention (first award winner from Nepal)
  - Grand Jury of AI Innovation, [Sparknify Human vs. AI Film Festival](https://www.sparknify.com/grand-jury-of-ai-innovation)
- **Contact:** mk314k@mit.edu
- **Links:**
  - Website: https://mk314k.github.io/
  - GitHub: https://github.com/mk314k
  - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mk314k/
  - X (Twitter): https://x.com/mk314k
  - MIT Thesis (DSpace): https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/163018

## Publications & Technical Writing
- **Master's Thesis (MIT CSAIL, 2025):** [Minimalist Approach to End-to-End Vision Language Navigation with Multi-Modal Foundation Model Features](https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/163018)
- **Expository Papers:**
  - [Transformer Based Learning to Rank](https://mk314k.github.io/writing/transformer-based-learning-to-rank)
  - [Iterative Polynomial Root Finding Algorithms](https://mk314k.github.io/writing/iterative-polynomial-root-finding)
  - [Multiplicative Weight Update in Reinforcement Learning](https://mk314k.github.io/writing/multiplicative-weight-update-in-rl)
  - [Random Walk](https://mk314k.github.io/writing/random-walk)

## Site Navigation
- [Home & About](https://mk314k.github.io/)
- [Projects & Open Source](https://mk314k.github.io/project)
- [Curriculum Vitae / Resume](https://mk314k.github.io/resume)