Aarav Kapoor
Founder & CEO, Photon Arc (YC W26)
Ex-NVIDIA, Apple and X engineer now building orbital solar power for data centers, backed by a $6.5M seed from YC.
- $6.5MSeed round raised
- $18M/yrCompute costs saved
- 1B+Devices running his ML runtime
- 40 MWCapacity under letters of intent
Experience
Co-founder & CEO at Photon Arc
2025 – Now
Raised $6.5M seed; beamed 1.2 kW wirelessly over 1 km at 31% efficiency
Staff Software Engineer, Recommendation Infrastructure at X (formerly Twitter)
2022 – 2025
Moved candidate scoring to GPU inference, saving $18M a year in compute
Senior Software Engineer, Core ML at Apple
2019 – 2022
Shipped on-device transformer runtime behind Siri and Photos on 1B+ devices
Software Engineer, CUDA Libraries (cuDNN) at NVIDIA
2016 – 2019
Wrote fused attention and convolution kernels in cuDNN; 2.3x speedup on Volta
Education
- Stanford UniversityM.S. Computer Science (Systems), 2016
- IIT BombayB.Tech Electrical Engineering, 2014
Skills
- CUDA
- C++
- Rust
- Distributed systems
- ML inference
- GPU performance
- Power electronics
- Fundraising
- Hiring
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