Nitish Srivastava

Co-Founder and CTO at Vayu Robotics; Machine Learning for Robotics and Autonomous Systems

[Nitish Srivastava @nitishsr]

@liyuajia Amazing journey Yujia! Looking forward to what’s next from you

[Nitish Srivastava @nitishsr]

Those were some unforgettable days!

[Russ Salakhutdinov @rsalakhu]

Charlie @tang_1c was one of my very first PhD students at Toronto. I still remember those days when together with Nitish @nitishsr, we were pitching our research to Apple execs. Great memories and fun times!

[Nitish Srivastava @nitishsr]

It has been a privilege to work with @rsalakhu at Toronto, Perceptual Machines, Apple, and having him as an advisor at Vayu! I’m deeply grateful for your constant support and encouragement.

[Russ Salakhutdinov @rsalakhu]

I’ve been asked several times whether Zhilin Yang, the founder of @Kimi_Moonshot was my PhD student. The answer is yes and he is absolutely brilliant.

But I’ve been incredibly fortunate to work with so many outstanding PhD students over the years. So I thought I’d brag a little about them and their career paths (of course there are also many MSc and undergraduate students, sorry if I missed anyone):

Founders / Founding Team Members

Devendra Chaplot @dchaplot PhD, Founding Member Thinking Machines / Mistral
Zhilin Yang PhD, Founder & CEO, Moonshot AI
Jimmy Ba @jimmybajimmyba MSc/PhD, Co-founder xAI
Hubert Tsai PhD, Co-founder Spuree, Apple
Nitish Srivastava @nitishsr PhD, Co-founder Perceptual Machines; Co-founder Vayu Robotics
Charlie Tang PhD, Co-founder Perceptual Machines, DE Shaw.

Professors
Paul Liang @pliang279 PhD, MIT
Ben Eysenbach @ben_eysenbach PhD, Princeton University
Ruosong Wang @RuosongW PhD, Peking University
Bhuwan Dhingra @bhuwandhingra PhD, Duke University
Roger Grosse @RogerGrosse Postdoc, University of Toronto
Alexander Schwing Postdoc, UIUC

Research Scientists
Shuyan Zhou @shuyanzh36, Postdoc, Meta Superintelligence Lab
Tiffany Min @SoYeonTiffMin PhD, Microsoft AI
Murtaza Dalal @mihdalal PhD, Tesla AI
Minji Yoon @MinjiYoon90 , PhD, Microsoft AI
Shrimai Prabhumoye PhD, NVIDIA AI, Mistral
Haitian Sun @sun_haitian PhD, Google DeepMind
Emilio Parisotto PhD, Google DeepMind
Lisa Lee PhD @rl_agent, Google DeepMind
Manzil Zaheer @ManzilZaheer PhD, Google DeepMind
Jamie Kiros PhD, Google Brain, OpenAI
Yuri Burda PhD, OpenAI, Anthropic
Cody Severinski PhD, Amazon

[Russ Salakhutdinov @rsalakhu]

I’ve been asked several times whether Zhilin Yang, the founder of @Kimi_Moonshot was my PhD student. The answer is yes and he is absolutely brilliant.

But I’ve been incredibly fortunate to work with so many outstanding PhD students over the years. So I thought I’d brag a little about them and their career paths (of course there are also many MSc and undergraduate students, sorry if I missed anyone):

Founders / Founding Team Members

Devendra Chaplot @dchaplot PhD, Founding Member Thinking Machines / Mistral
Zhilin Yang PhD, Founder & CEO, Moonshot AI
Jimmy Ba @jimmybajimmyba MSc/PhD, Co-founder xAI
Hubert Tsai PhD, Co-founder Spuree, Apple
Nitish Srivastava @nitishsr PhD, Co-founder Perceptual Machines; Co-founder Vayu Robotics
Charlie Tang PhD, Co-founder Perceptual Machines, DE Shaw.

Professors
Paul Liang @pliang279 PhD, MIT
Ben Eysenbach @ben_eysenbach PhD, Princeton University
Ruosong Wang @RuosongW PhD, Peking University
Bhuwan Dhingra @bhuwandhingra PhD, Duke University
Roger Grosse @RogerGrosse Postdoc, University of Toronto
Alexander Schwing Postdoc, UIUC

Research Scientists
Shuyan Zhou @shuyanzh36, Postdoc, Meta Superintelligence Lab
Tiffany Min @SoYeonTiffMin PhD, Microsoft AI
Murtaza Dalal @mihdalal PhD, Tesla AI
Minji Yoon @MinjiYoon90 , PhD, Microsoft AI
Shrimai Prabhumoye PhD, NVIDIA AI, Mistral
Haitian Sun @sun_haitian PhD, Google DeepMind
Emilio Parisotto PhD, Google DeepMind
Lisa Lee PhD @rl_agent, Google DeepMind
Manzil Zaheer @ManzilZaheer PhD, Google DeepMind
Jamie Kiros PhD, Google Brain, OpenAI
Yuri Burda PhD, OpenAI, Anthropic
Cody Severinski PhD, Amazon

[Serve Robotics @ServeRobotics]

Big news: We've acquired @VayuRobotics!

Vayu’s team of visionary engineers, researchers, and business leaders join Serve with decades of experience developing and commercializing advanced technologies in vehicles and robotics.

Full announcement: https://t.co/gIHxcJn7AK

[Nitish Srivastava @nitishsr]

Full details https://t.co/LiSedS5FK3

[Nitish Srivastava @nitishsr]

Exciting news: @VayuRobotics has been acquired by @ServeRobotics!

Serve operates one of the world’s largest fleets of autonomous delivery robots, bringing innovation to city sidewalks every day. Joining forces means we can take our mission to the next level, deploying physical AI in the real world to solve the complex interactions that happen in unstructured sidewalk environments.

Building Vayu has been an incredibly rewarding journey. We created an end-to-end autonomy stack from the ground up, designed a data engine capable of generating corner cases at scale, pioneered a training paradigm that made seamless sim-to-real transfer possible, and deployed the model on our robot fleet in one Bay Area city.

I’m deeply grateful to our amazing Vayu team whose dedication and brilliance made this possible, our collaborators and partners, and to our investors, especially @vkhosla, for believing in our vision from the start.

Special thanks to my wife Paridha Saxena for her support throughout the ups and downs of this journey.

The path ahead is thrilling. We are building technology that will not just navigate the world, but truly interact with it!

[Vayu Robotics @VayuRobotics]

Excited to announce that Vayu Robotics is joining Serve Robotics! Special shoutout to our co-founders Anand Gopalan, Mahesh Krishnamurthi, Nitish Srivastava, and our incredible team—you made this possible.

[Nitish Srivastava @nitishsr]

@mihdalal @rsalakhu @deepakpathak Congratulations Murtaza!

[Nitish Srivastava @nitishsr]

Thank you @rsalakhu for visiting @VayuRobotics and spending time with our team! It was a pleasure showcasing a live demonstration of our robots in action.

[Russ Salakhutdinov @rsalakhu]

It is always fun to visit Bay Area and catch up with old friends and former students.

Here is @VayuRobotics , co-founded by my former student Nitish Srivastava @nitishsr, leading the way in building the next generation of autonomous delivery robots!

[Nitish Srivastava @nitishsr]

An absolute honor to celebrate @geoffreyhinton Nobel Prize in Physics with him at the @VayuRobotics office today! 🎉 It has been a privilege being his PhD student and working with him on Boltzmann Machines! Grateful for his continued mentorship at Vayu 🙏

[Nitish Srivastava @nitishsr]

Enjoyed speaking with @StartupHubAI for this fantastic article that highlights our cutting-edge technology. A big thank you to @d_jsinger for taking the time to delve into our work at Vayu Robotics and share our story with the world. Check it out https://t.co/tbaV9PEVg9

[Vayu Robotics @VayuRobotics]

We chatted with @TechCrunch about our approach to delivery robotics.

With support from investors like @khoslaventures we have solved the problems that have plagued delivery robotics and created a solution that can be deployed at scale.

https://t.co/p3x1osCcZ6

[Vayu Robotics @VayuRobotics]

“The Vayu solution is intended to be a sort of Goldilocks solution for delivery needs: just the right size."

@johnkoetsier at @Forbes

https://t.co/qgrytLQNeH

[Vayu Robotics @VayuRobotics]

“The company stands out with its unique approach. They’ve tapped the power of foundation models to create a delivery system that can navigate autonomously in any environment - without using the complex and expensive tech stack normally required.”

- @VentureBeat

[Nitish Srivastava @nitishsr]

Check out our blog post https://t.co/Xa41suqTBN for more!

[Nitish Srivastava @nitishsr]

Excited to share our progress towards building a scalable data engine for training a robotic mobility foundation model! Using game engine-based simulation and vision models trained on web-scale data, we can train end-to-end models that excel in the real world.

[Nitish Srivastava @nitishsr]

“Learning to move” can then be solved in the representation space of the vision foundation model using diverse simulated environments where corner case scenarios can be generated at scale.