Vignesh Rajmohan

Founder at Pivot Robotics

[Ronak Malde @rronak_]

I’ve left Google DeepMind.

The last two years have been an incredible whirlwind.

A couple years ago, I joined a small startup called Codeium. There, I got to ship Windsurf, train SWE-1 (a frontier agentic coding model), go to DeepMind in the $2.4B acquisition. Now, I decided to leave the acquisition money and DeepMind.

I’m grateful to the mentors, teammates, and friends I worked with along the way.

At Windsurf, thanks to @_mohansolo and Douglas Chen, I got to see what a fast moving startup that ships relentlessly and builds for the future looks like. I learned from @thenickmoy how excellent research leadership can drive outsized innovation.

At DeepMind, I got to push the frontier of agentic coding, be part of the amazing team that shipped Antigravity and contributed to Gemini 3. DeepMind is a rare place: deeply curious people, exceptional research taste, and access to enormous compute and Google-scale infrastructure.

A few things that I learned:

1. Finding the right hill to climb. Now more than ever, there are a multitude of directions to push the frontier in AI research. It’s easy to optimize for the wrong benchmark or capability. You should step back regularly to question if you are climbing the right hill, and adjust course often.

2. The secret to being a fast-moving team. Moving quickly is not just about working hard and long hours. It requires making concrete bets about where the world will be in 6 months, aligning around them, and cutting everything else. This was our journey from the Codeium Extension → Windsurf IDE → SWE-1 → Antigravity → Antigravity CLI

3. Silicon Valley is small. Since the split of Windsurf to DeepMind and Cognition, many of my colleagues have gone to other exciting places - Thinking Machines, OpenAI, xAI, Cursor, fast-moving startups, or started their own companies. I’m grateful to have worked with so many talented, hungry people whose stories are not yet finished.

So what’s next?

We are living in one of the most exciting and powerful times in human history. Just like we transformed software engineering, soon every industry, every unit of work will be radically transformed, democratized, accelerated. With this comes new challenges, and new doors of frontier research to be opened.

More soon.

[Vignesh Rajmohan @vrajmo]

@elonmusk That is actually pretty amazing

[Vignesh Rajmohan @vrajmo]

@make_robot_go 😭

[Vignesh Rajmohan @vrajmo]

@lukaspet Feel better soon!

[Vignesh Rajmohan @vrajmo]

@charles_maddock The team is so goated, great group of guys

[Vignesh Rajmohan @vrajmo]

Year one in production! Can’t wait to see these numbers at the end of 2026.

[clayton @clayhaight]

I built a $30 bird feeder camera for my mom for Christmas, it does motion detection and bird classification and is hosted on a private domain.

I haven't done much web before, and wanted to see how far I could get with Claude Code - it built the entire system including firmware for the ESP32 and deployment on Fly. I literally just had to link everything together.

[Vignesh Rajmohan @vrajmo]

@connorkapoor These look great!

[Vignesh Rajmohan @vrajmo]

@zanehengsperger @noxmetals Metal block (robot baseplate) in the back of the Subaru Outback, this is the new wave

[clayton @clayhaight]

2 years ago I was working on trying to productionize ALOHA, when Tony told me on a call he wanted to build home robots. I stopped working on it, dropped everything, and moved into a quaint house in Mountain View.

Since then I've had the pleasure of working with this world class team who think for themselves and have pulled off the impossible.

[Vignesh Rajmohan @vrajmo]

@selenemiyu @pivotrobotics Great to meet you!

[Vignesh Rajmohan @vrajmo]

@zanehengsperger @noxmetals Congrats!

[Vignesh Rajmohan @vrajmo]

1 cycle for 1 sku, unedited

And then an hour of continuous cycles for that same sku, sped up a lot

[Matt Freed @mattfreed]

The robotics vibe is not a quick clips launch video - it’s raw uncut footage of things working end to end reliably

[Madhav Bhat @mmmadhavvv]

I’ve thought for a long time that there needs to be more resources for recruiting for mechanical engineering jobs.

It’s been exciting to work w/ Hardware is Hard to launch part 1 of my thoughts on how to recruit for MechEs, check it out!

https://t.co/hfmeL4YSgr

[Matt Freed @mattfreed]

To achieve truly generalizable robots, we need to solve the dexterity problem.

And it’s time to come clean: that’s what @sirwart and I have been working on

Here's a look at continuous autonomous in-hand manipulation on our (very) early prototype hardware.

I won't lie, hands are hard. Building hands that are not only capable, but durable enough for extensive amounts of industry usage is even harder. You have to choose your constraints wisely.

We have a clear direct path forward, and are starting to move into industrial applications. If you have a job that couldn't be done using conventional end effectors that you want automated - reach out over dm’s or contact us on our website

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The hand you see here is 10 dof, 3 finger + thumb, linkage driven, in-house touch sensors, human hand sized in the necessary dimensions with the structure being 100% sheet metal produced by @sendcutsend

Our tiny 2 person team has gone through a significant amount of iterations - and sheet metal allowed us to quickly and cost effectively create dev hardware that we could put plenty of hours on.

Move fast, touch metal, and build something great

[Vignesh Rajmohan @vrajmo]

@meh_agarwal Thanks Mehul!

[Vignesh Rajmohan @vrajmo]

@jasonjoyride Can’t wait

[Vignesh Rajmohan @vrajmo]

Pivot Robotics in the field!

Check out the vibes we’re bringing to American manufacturing. 🦾