Rishav Agarwal

Rishav Agarwal

Perception Lead at Gritt Robotics. Previously Intrinsic (Alphabet), Akasha Imaging (acquired). Computer vision, 6DoF pose estimation, foundation models.

Most robotics companies treat perception as a preprocessing step — a box that spits out coordinates. I think that's exactly backwards. Perception is the bottleneck. It's the thing that determines whether your robot can handle the real world or only works in a cage.

The gap between a demo and a product in robotics is almost always a perception problem. You don't need better planners. You need eyes that actually work.

I've spent my career closing that gap: building foundation models that generalize to unseen objects, writing CUDA kernels that run in single-digit milliseconds, and shipping systems that work in production — not just in simulation.

Gritt Robotics

Perception Lead
2024 – Present
Leading perception systems for autonomous robotic operations. Own the full vision stack.

Intrinsic (Alphabet)

Senior Software Engineer, Perception
2021 – 2024

Akasha Imaging

Software Engineer, Computer Vision
2020 – 2021
Early engineer at a Bay Area deep imaging startup (MIT News). Built core vision pipelines. Acquired by Alphabet → became Intrinsic.

EXL Services

Consultant, Analytics
2016 – 2018
Data science consulting for retail and media clients.
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 in computer vision & object detection. Reviewer for CVPR, AAAI, BMVC, NeurIPS, PLOS ONE. Mitacs Accelerate Fellow. CIFAR DLRL Summer School 2020.

Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur

B.Tech, Materials Science & Engineering
2012 – 2016
Research intern at Rutgers University & Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Published at UbiComp 2016 and PLOS ONE. 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.