Abhay Venkatesh

Abhay Venkatesh

San Francisco, CA
Email: abhay.venkatesh[at]gmail[dot]com
LinkedIn · X · Google Scholar

About

Abhay is an AI engineer and researcher. He was an early ML engineer at Anduril, working on autonomy and later on frontier models for national security. Before that he did machine learning research.

Engineering

Frontier AI at Anduril

Abhay helped start Anduril’s Frontier AI team and built AI infrastructure supporting work across the company, including training infrastructure used to post-train models for national security applications.

Related programs: Thunderforge, Anduril’s OpenAI partnership, and CDAO’s Edge Data Mesh for generative AI.

Mission Autonomy

Abhay worked directly with CEO Brian Schimpf to co-invent and patent foundational systems for Lattice for Mission Autonomy, which enables teams of autonomous systems to carry out complex missions under human supervision. Lattice for Mission Autonomy has since been flight-tested on Fury (YFQ-44A), Anduril’s aircraft for the U.S. Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program.

Lattice C2 and APIs

Abhay worked on Lattice Command & Control (C2) and designed the tasking APIs, which let operators and software create, route, and track tasks across assets and teams of assets.

Writing

Selected papers

Full publication list on Google Scholar.

Patents

Abhay Venkatesh, Brian W. Schimpf, Elston Tochip, Jared Newman, Joshua John Bennett, Nikhil Reddy, Samuel R. Elie

Investing

Alongside his engineering and research, Abhay angel invests in AI and frontier technology. His investments include Mercor, Factory AI, Saronic, OpenAI, Fluidstack, American Terawatt, Cartesia, Airbound, Aalo, Sabi, Novig, Trajectory, Reactor, and Irving. He has also scouted for Sequoia, Greylock, Index Ventures, and Bain Capital Ventures.

Communities

Talks and podcasts


Last updated: 09/2026