
talent eng @spacexai | 👼 forward deployed angels | 2x founder | @uwaterloo
San Francisco, CA
Joined August 2015
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Founders have an incredibly difficult job.
Creating something from nothing is insanely hard.
I try to provide more than just capital and be as useful as possible in removing barriers so founders can focus on building.
It’s a privilege to be working with unapologetically ambitious founders like @weberwongwong
enough about forward-deployed engineers
we need more forward-deployed angels
was thinking about this because one of our angels Umesh Khanna (@forwarddeploy) has just been pulling up on Sundays and going deep with us on the product problems we're dealing with, designing growth loops, sharpening our "aha" moments and more. It’s been super helpful
very lucky to have him aboard the FLORA cap table
Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
Replying to @JensenHuang
@JensenHuang at GTC:
"Here's Trajectory and Harvey using Nemotron, post-trained it and created their own frontier-level capability."
"With customization and with partners in the ecosystem that we work with, you could turn these models into the frontier.
And a result, turn your proprietary data into sovereign intelligence"
It's great to be doing work with such amazing companies like @harvey and @nvidia over here at @trajectorylabs!
Such an incredible team!
We just raised a $60M Series B at a $1B valuation to build @daytonaio into the Agent Cloud.
@FirstMarkCap led the round, with all key existing investors and angels doubling down.
We're also thrilled to welcome the founders of some generational companies aboard, including @patrickc (Stripe), @tobi (Shopify), @AravSrinivas (Perplexity), @BrendanFoody (Mercor), @oliveur (Datadog), @adamdangelo (Quora) and @ericsyuan (Zoom)
We're a 35-person team. But that's about to change; we're hiring across the board, and we'd love for you to join us.
Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
I couldn't be more excited to announce Supernova by @KnotAPIs.
For years, we've poured our hearts and souls into building the technology behind Knot.
Today, it powers more than 1 million actions every day for some of the largest financial institutions in the world.
Now, we're putting that same technology in your hands: Supernova turns virtually any action on any website into an API.
Tell Supernova what you want to do and Supernova, if needed, uses a VM to learn the action once, then turns it into a reusable API. Frictionless authentication, persistent connections, health checks, self-healing, and ongoing maintenance? All handled by Supernova.
The result: An API you can call over and over, without spinning up a browser every time.
Think about what this unlocks:
🛒 Commerce: Build APIs to search, shop, and purchase across retailers.
🏦 Financial services: Connect accounts, retrieve transactions, and manage payments.
🚀 Entrepreneurs: Build the next Finicity/Plaid/MX for procurement, Stripe for returns, or an entirely new API business.
Everything we've built at Knot is proof of what's possible. But our products are just a handful of ideas from one team.
Our ambition isn't just to build the next great Knot product. It's to help you build tens of thousands of your own, including things we never would have imagined.
We're opening the Supernova waitlist to developers, and we can't wait to see what you build.
Sign up for the waitlist below👇
knotapi.com/supernova/
Called it almost a year ago, congrats on the launch fellas
lnkd.in/p/gHqMbwXx
We are releasing Ultramarine 1 Flash, a frontier-class model built for knowledge work. It is open-source and achieves similar performance to Fable 5, while being 60x cheaper.
It was post-trained by a team of 5 for ~$300k all-in. Available on API now, with weights releasing in 2 weeks.
Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
We are releasing Ultramarine 1 Flash, a frontier-class model built for knowledge work. It is open-source and achieves similar performance to Fable 5, while being 60x cheaper.
It was post-trained by a team of 5 for ~$300k all-in. Available on API now, with weights releasing in 2 weeks.
Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
At our first @money2020, @KnotAPIs had one product and a pitch most people hadn’t heard before: let consumers move their card to a merchant in a few taps.
This year we arrive with record quarter-over-quarter growth, millions of connected merchant accounts, and our most exciting partnership opportunities yet.
The conversation has changed. We’re no longer explaining why Knot should exist. Prospects experience Knot for the first time in the apps they already use, everyone understands the revenue opportunity, and financial institutions want Knot live before they’re the only ones without it.
What started with CardSwitcher has become something much bigger: infrastructure that connects users to their merchant accounts, automates actions, and keeps those connections working securely at scale. CardSwitcher has become the perfect wedge into selling additional products, and new Knot cross-sells have surpassed even my own expectations.
In the past few months, the market has moved entirely in our favor too. Merchant connectivity is the layer the whole industry decided it needed. Issuers want top of wallet, networks want their token in the merchant file, and nobody wants a third party disintermediating the relationship between them and the consumer. It’s now clear that whoever owns the connectivity layer owns the consumer relationship.
We’re heading into Vegas with more excitement and a fuller calendar than ever: issuers, partners we couldn’t have dreamed of, and everyone wanting a piece of the merchant connectivity layer.
The question is no longer why Knot, or whether Knot works: It’s who will own the connection between users and merchants.
Chai and Samosas 🫖
I asked people: "who has hosted great events in SF?"
2 votes each:
- Alicia (@sharedalbums)
- Ben Lang (@benln)
- Dave Fontenot (@davefontenot)
- Ankit Gupta (@AnkitGuptaAI)
- Harbor (@alexgshaw, @ryan_marten)
- Joanne Shang (@JoanneShang)
- Midjourney (@DavidSHolz, @aalleexx)
- Ricardo de Arruda (@notawizard)
- Sarah Chieng (@MilksandMatcha)
- Sukone Hong (@sukonehong)
- Umesh Khanna (@forwarddeploy)
- Vivian Shen (@vivianmshen)
40 people voted. People couldn't pick themselves. I didn't vote.
Continued:
Flattered to be on the list!
If you want to chat about data and xAI, feel free to reach out.
I asked people: "who have you met in the AI data and post-training space that you find most insightful?"
5 votes: Daniel Chang (@dnnssl2)
3 votes each:
- Abhijay Rana (@abhijaymrana)
- Ryan Wexler (@RyanMWexler)
- Sean Cai (@SeanZCai)
- Will Brown (@willcb)
2 votes each:
- Amy Tam (@amytam01)
- Jesse Hu (@huyouare)
- Nikhil Namburi (@nikhilvnamburi)
- Thomas Liao (@distributionat)
91 people were picked. The other 82 got 1 vote each and are in the next two posts.
People couldn't pick themselves. I didn't vote.
Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
I visited Starbase recently with some of the Grok team and haven’t stopped thinking about it since. It’s such an inspiring city, company, and mission!
Honored to be at SpaceXAI, and grateful for the opportunity to help accelerate the mission through Grok 🚀
Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
I asked people: "who have you met in the AI data and post-training space that you find most insightful?"
5 votes: Daniel Chang (@dnnssl2)
3 votes each:
- Abhijay Rana (@abhijaymrana)
- Ryan Wexler (@RyanMWexler)
- Sean Cai (@SeanZCai)
- Will Brown (@willcb)
2 votes each:
- Amy Tam (@amytam01)
- Jesse Hu (@huyouare)
- Nikhil Namburi (@nikhilvnamburi)
- Thomas Liao (@distributionat)
91 people were picked. The other 82 got 1 vote each and are in the next two posts.
People couldn't pick themselves. I didn't vote.
Another Canadian doing some great work 🇨🇦
Congrats @0xSigil
Introducing Underdog, your Private Personal AI on devices you already own
Today we're announcing our backing from @a16z @khoslaventures @HummingbirdVC Anthology (@AnthropicAI @MenloVentures) @patrickc @naval @rauchg @polynoamial @Thom_Wolf @Mascobot @tszzl @OfficialLoganK and other top AI leaders
Our mission is to provide free, capable, reliable and private AI to billions of people.
Underdog’s Law: today’s frontier intelligence reaches your devices in six months.
We’re starting with fast, capable AI that runs on consumer hardware. By co-designing models and inference engines, we’re pushing the frontier of capability, speed, power and data efficiency.
Our research also spans agentic commerce, confidential inference, and how AI will reshape the internet economy.
Privacy and capability no longer needs to be a tradeoff. If you believe in this future, join us. Time to build.
Frontier getting Starlink before Delta 🤦
Plot twist: Your next flight might have better Wi-Fi than your home. @Starlink, Wi-Fi coming in 2027. 🛜✈️
news.flyfrontier.com/frontie…
Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
I'm hiring for our Talent Engineering team at @spacexai!
Looking for people who love working with exceptional humans as much as (or more than) building product. A few things that we look for:
1) You’re an engineer who can build things to get the job done, being able to 80/20 most things.
2) You care about people and you've been making intros, supporting founders, and bringing great people together for years, without calling it a job. Your skillset aligns with that of a VC (and you might be one someday!)
3) You’re naturally magnetic in communities. People take your calls because you genuinely love to help and care about them!
4) You don’t wait to be told what to do, you've been a go-getter and can get shit done.
If any of these resonate and you want to be a critical part to the inner workings of a frontier lab, then I'd love to meet!
👋 Warm intros through a mutual otherwise feel free to email me at [email protected]!
🤖 Made with AI
Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
Seeing @shaunmmaguire go to war like that for a port co and be ride or die for his founders restores my faith in honor among VCs
I'm hiring for our Talent Engineering team at @spacexai!
Looking for people who love working with exceptional humans as much as (or more than) building product. A few things that we look for:
1) You’re an engineer who can build things to get the job done, being able to 80/20 most things.
2) You care about people and you've been making intros, supporting founders, and bringing great people together for years, without calling it a job. Your skillset aligns with that of a VC (and you might be one someday!)
3) You’re naturally magnetic in communities. People take your calls because you genuinely love to help and care about them!
4) You don’t wait to be told what to do, you've been a go-getter and can get shit done.
If any of these resonate and you want to be a critical part to the inner workings of a frontier lab, then I'd love to meet!
👋 Warm intros through a mutual otherwise feel free to email me at [email protected]!
🤖 Made with AI
Legends just getting started ⭐️
Proximal builds infrastructure that enables AI to improve from real-world experience.
In the past year, we have grown to more than $200M in annualized revenue helping frontier labs and enterprises improve coding agents. Now, we are expanding beyond software engineering.
Recent progress in mathematics demonstrates what happens when models are trained in domains with massive amounts of public data and easy verifiability, making it easy to find weaknesses, generate training tasks, and iterate quickly.
We build infrastructure that enables this feedback loop in other domains: we are excited about a world in which AI systems design targeted drugs, accelerate chip design, and rewrite legacy software that still runs hospitals, power grids, governments, and other critical infrastructure.
Since starting, we have assembled a small team of researchers and engineers and built world-class infrastructure for post-training and synthetic data research to overcome the challenges of scaling manual data curation.
Our team comes from Cursor, Google DeepMind, Meta Superintelligence, Prime Intellect, Citadel, and Jane Street. More than half are former founders.
We’re fortunate to be backed by investors who share that vision, including @generalcatalyst who led our $15M Seed Round at a $300M valuation, as well as @chemistry, @svangel, @dvlamoen and individuals like @LiamFedus, @kevinweil, and @bernhardsson
Can’t believe we saw this before launch with the xAI hackathon winners 🎉
Congrats to the @SpaceX team!




























