Vasu Raman

It's all about the atoms now. My goal is to ship autonomous systems that manipulate the physical world.

I'm an engineer and founder based in the Bay Area. My career has been a series of "firsts" in autonomy — I keep showing up early at companies and then building the thing that hasn't been built yet.

Most recently I co-founded Sauron with Kevin Hartz to build a new kind of home security — one that uses the full perception and autonomy stack of a self-driving car to protect people where they live. As CTO, I built the technical architecture, recruited the team, and took the company from zero to first customer deployments.

Before that, I spent four and a half years at Zipline, where I led vehicle behaviors across their drone platforms. My team's work was the foundation for the FAA's first-ever authorization of commercial beyond-visual-line-of-sight drone deliveries in the US. Before Zipline, I was the first behavior prediction hire at Nuro, where I helped enable the world's first unmanned commercial deliveries. And before that, I was an early engineer at Zoox, leading decision planning for their first autonomous rides on public streets in San Francisco.

I have a PhD in Computer Science from Cornell and did a postdoc at Caltech before turning down R1 faculty offers to build things that ship. My research on formal methods for safe autonomy has been cited over 3,000 times.

I once won Best Pun at the Bay Area Pun-Off.