Rishav Agarwal

Rishav Agarwal

I help robots see and understand the world.
Founder at a stealth startup.
Previously Gritt Robotics and Intrinsic (Google).

Gritt Robotics

Perception Lead
2025 – 2026
Led perception for robots that build utility-scale solar farms with top-10 US EPCs (Gritt Solar).
  • Robots installing 1 MW of solar per day: 900 kg machines placing 50 kg panels at high speed, with zero breakages
  • Segmentation and 6DoF pose estimation on the Gritt Foundation Model, running in deserts, marshes, rain, and snow
  • Long-tail data curation for worker safety: mined rare poses from TBs of daily site data, improving low-pose detection recall by 1.6 points (paper) IROS 2026 Workshop

Intrinsic (Google)

Deep Learning Engineer
2022 – 2025

Akasha Imaging

Deep Learning Engineer
2021 – 2022
Early engineer at a Bay Area deep imaging startup (MIT News). Built core vision pipelines. Acquired by Alphabet → became Intrinsic (now Google).

EXL Services

Consultant, Analytics
2016 – 2018
Data science consulting for retail and media clients. Built big data pipelines (65+ Tb, 50+ sources) and analytics dashboards.
Python · PyTorch

MatrixNet

Matrix-based anchor architecture for object detection. Rethinks how feature pyramids handle scale and aspect ratio variation. Paper →

View all on GitHub →

University of Waterloo

Master of Mathematics (MMath), Computer Science
2018 – 2020
Thesis on computer vision & object detection under Prof. Lukasz Golab. Mitacs Accelerate Fellow. Attended CIFAR Deep Learning + Reinforcement Learning Summer School (2020). Reviewer for CVPR, AAAI, BMVC, NeurIPS, and PLOS ONE.

Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur

B.Tech, Materials Science & Engineering
2012 – 2016
Research intern at Rutgers University under Prof. Vivek Singh and at Academia Sinica, Taiwan under Prof. Kuan-Ta Chen. Quiz Club coordinator.

I occasionally advise and angel invest in early-stage robotics and applied ML companies. If you're building something interesting, reach out.