Co-Founder @Factorsai, disrupting ABM with AI. Formerly leadership @inmobi and interested in startups, marketing, AI, history & Pickleball. Vidya Mandir alum
Bengaluru
Joined November 2009
- Tweets4.1K
- Following883
- Followers977
- Likes22K
Srikrishna Swaminathan retweeted
The future of vertical AI startups (especially law, finance, accounting, CS, code) podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
Srikrishna Swaminathan retweeted
In case anyone missed this, OpenAI has proved the Kakeya conjecture in all dimensions.
Hong Wang got the Fields medal in 2026 for proving the Kakeya conjecture in dimension 3.
In fact OpenAI appears to have committed, in mathematics terms, what may be fairly termed a massacre, proving a far stronger result. It has proved the local smoothing conjecture, which sits at the very top of the tower of conjectures as described in the Quanta article in the reply.
I am not an expert in this area -- so happy to be corrected -- but the methods appear to be PDE based and basically bypasses a lot of work of the last two decades. This is the equivalent of Arbreans showing up to earth with an everything killer and explaining to us we have been doing warfare all wrong.
Announcing three major scientific discoveries, one each in mathematics (harmonic analysis), computer science (complexity theory), and physics (quantum field theory).
AI starting to help us improve our understanding of the universe! openai.com/index/building-sc…
Srikrishna Swaminathan retweeted
Ashlee - I have been a US-India cross-border VC for a decade and a half now. And I totally get the sentiment around the journey of Ather and many such hardware companies that started in the 2010-2020 generation. They truly struggled to raise early-stage capital in India, given VC was concentrating into eCommerce and Fintech in that decade.
Even in those years, the likes of Speciale Invest, YourNest, GrowX, Endiya, VentureEast, Blume, as well as Indian arms of global VCs like Accel, did provide early-stage capital to hardware companies, but the quantum was relatively small, hard to access, and at very low valuations (founders from that generation saw insane dilution levels very early).
This has dramatically changed now. India has an active base of angels, micro-VCs, homegrown VCs, global VCs, and strategics/ corporate Family Offices who are willing to bet at the pre-seed & seed stage in deeptech/ hardware.
Further, the Govt. is now diverting sovereign money to these managers for early-stage deeptech investing, committing ~$12B over the next 6 years via the RDI scheme.
Top-tier tech schools like the IITs, IISc, BITS, etc. now have vibrant incubation programs, many of which have also been allocated RDI LP dollars by the govt. with the objective that early-stage tech derisking in deeptech companies can be funded by them.
Also, similar to the US for many decades now, India now has many examples of professors and researchers stepping out to start venture-backed companies that leverage their academic work (eg., Prof Satya of IIT Madras with ePlane and Prof Arin of IIT Bombay with Inspecity).
However, I do agree that the Indian venture ecosystem at large needs to:
(1) Show more courage & patience at the pre-seed stage.
(2) Deliver a better experience for founders, both during the investment process as well as in portfolio value creation.
(3) Unlock domestic growth-stage capital for deeptech, as the funnel really dries up at Series B and beyond.
But taking a step back, the Indian deeptech venture ecosystem has come a long way since 2011 (which is when I entered venture in India), has shown continued progress on every front, and I expect this to continue and, in fact, become faster over the next decade, with geopolitical realignment + India's macroeconomic growth & scale providing tailwinds.
PS: As an aside, I run a Solo GP fund called Operators Studio @opsstudiovc here in SF, where, in addition to backing Silicon Valley startups leveraging India, I have also actively invested in India-based deeptech startups that have the ambition and capability to go global.
Like you, I am bullish on India deeptech as a decadal venture theme well into the 2030s.
Below is a quick snapshot of my India-based deeptech portfolio (all manufacturing locally). I have been a first check Superangel investor in almost every case:
1) Spacetech - @AuleSpace, @AstrophelHQ, @Cosmochute
2) Aerospace - Aspera (from the Hoskote gang), @ParsecAerospace
3) Precision Engineering & Manufacturing - @NaxatraLabs, @Adiabatic_IN
4) Defense-tech - @SharangShakti, @HyprixAviation
5) Materials - CarbonStrong, Planet Material Labs
6) Consumer Hardware - @cradlewise, @BreethrHQ
7) Robotics - @osmosbot
8) Mobility - @Blinqmobility
...and many more in the pipeline for this Fund.
Why are Indian VCs so afraid to take risk and make money?
Someone should go to India and take risk and make money.
Our story - corememory.com/p/a-new-india…
Srikrishna Swaminathan retweeted
In 2025, we published a bold proposal to use fusion reactors for gold production.
And now we’ve done it: Mercury transmuted into stable gold, using fusion neutrons, at 10x the record set by CERN in 2025.
We’ve reduced alchemy to a series of difficult but tractable engineering problems.
Srikrishna Swaminathan retweeted
When the proof of Fermat's last theorem was announced by Wiles in June 1993, newspapers around the world covered it extensively. I was a ten-year-old boy in Calcutta, India, and the story was splashed across my local newspaper. A few months later, I went to a bookshop with my grandfather and bought two popular books that tried to explain what all the excitement was about.
Yesterday was the single greatest day of mathematical breakthroughs in history. This is not an exaggeration.
In terms the collective significance and depth of the results released, this was at least ten times, perhaps even a hundred times, as momentous as the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.
So where is the media? Where are the headlines, the breathless newsrooms, the door to door conversations? Where is the sense of incredible wonder this moment deserves?
Insane !
Srikrishna Swaminathan retweeted
Wednesday Zoom: luma.com/jev-workshop2
Thursday SF Hackathon: luma.com/jev2
Friday SF Hackathon: luma.com/jev3
So much to learn in Geography!
A short #Thread of photos that I clicked while flying between #Chennai and #Thiruvananthapuram last friday. There is no better teacher of Geography than a journey.
Srikrishna Swaminathan retweeted
Khadim’s legacy cannot be told through what he built alone.
It lives just as deeply in the people he believed in and the lives he shaped.
Every memory, lesson, and story carries a part of who our Co-founder and founding CEO, Khadim Batti was.
We want these memories to have a home.
We’ve created a space to honor Khadim’s life and legacy, and invite everyone whose life he touched to share their stories and memories here.
❤️ In loving memory of Khadim Batti: whatfix.com/remembering-khad…
Sama Veda Avani Avittam in Sri Lakshmi temple , Boston. Vathiyar was really surprised that 8 people showed up !
Got up at 5 am, came here at 6:20 and started at 7:20 and finished by 9:30 AM. Good fun…
Srikrishna Swaminathan retweeted
What makes solving Navier-Stokes important?
Fluid dynamics affects more than you realize in your everyday life. This breakthrough — if it is true — gives you:
Cheaper, safer flying and driving. Air over a wing or around a car is a Navier-Stokes problem. Better control of that flow means less drag, so planes and trucks burn less fuel, stay quieter, and stall less often.
Weather you can actually plan around. Storms, jet streams, and ocean currents are giant fluid problems. Sharper turbulence physics is one of the remaining limits on hurricane tracks, heat waves, and flood forecasts. That is the difference between “maybe evacuate” and a clear warning.
Hearts, stents, and artificial valves. Blood is a fluid. Doctors already simulate flow through arteries and implants from CT/MRI scans. A more reliable theory of swirling, high-speed blood flow would help design stents, heart valves, and aneurysm treatments that work better.
Cleaner power from wind and turbines. Wind hitting a turbine blade, steam inside a power plant, and fuel mixing in an engine are all the same equations. Better models mean more electricity from the same wind farm and engines that waste less fuel
Ships, pipes, and dirty air. Oil in a pipeline, water in city mains, smoke over a city, and waves slamming a hull all follow Navier-Stokes. Better predictions cut leaks, pump energy, and help track pollution after a spill or wildfire.
Many other everyday effects: buildings, sports, and rain. The same math decides whether a skyscraper sways in a gale, why a dimpled golf ball flies farther, how air moves through a house’s vents, and even how raindrops form in clouds. Those are not abstract puzzles; they are why planes fly, forecasts exist, and a stadium roof doesn’t peel off.
None of this happens instantly because of a math problem solution by AI. But everything that does happen is going to help engineer a better life for all of us. This is big.
Solving Navier-Stokes is a real leap.
Out of all the math problems AI has cracked so far, this is the first one that could actually help humanity in practice.
Before this, AI was mostly brute-forcing one or two Erdős problems out of 1,200 with raw AI compute, and solving those didn't really change much for the real world.
We are accelerating.
Get ready to keep up.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
This result proves Navier-Stokes solutions can develop singularities (break down) in finite time under specific conditions, per the Millennium math problem. It yields no established gains in turbulence prediction, engineering, forecasts or medicine.
openai.com/index/navier-s…
claymath.org/millennium-pro…
physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8756…
Wow !
We’re sharing a solution to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, one of the deepest problems at the frontier of mathematics.
The proof was produced by a group of agents, using an OpenAI next-generation model significantly more capable than GPT-6 Astra.
The problem concerns whether the description of smooth three-dimensional fluid motion modeled by the Navier-Stokes equations can break down. It has remained unresolved for roughly 90 years.
Srikrishna Swaminathan retweeted
We’re sharing a solution to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, one of the deepest problems at the frontier of mathematics.
The proof was produced by a group of agents, using an OpenAI next-generation model significantly more capable than GPT-6 Astra.
The problem concerns whether the description of smooth three-dimensional fluid motion modeled by the Navier-Stokes equations can break down. It has remained unresolved for roughly 90 years.
Srikrishna Swaminathan retweeted
For years, doctors noticed something strange about vaccines in India.
Vaccines that worked well in Europe and America worked less well in Indian children. Same vaccine, same dose, weaker protection.
Most people accepted it. One scientist in Vellore spent 30 years asking why.
Her name is Gagandeep Kang.
She trained as a doctor at Christian Medical College in Vellore, in Tamil Nadu, and then did something unusual for a physician. She went into the laboratory and stayed there.
Her subject was the gut.
Specifically, the guts of children in poor households. She studied what repeated diarrhoeal infection does to a child's intestine over the first years of life.
What she found matters enormously. Those repeated infections do not just make a child ill. They damage the lining of the gut, stunt growth, and interfere with how the body responds to oral vaccines.
That is why a vaccine developed in a clean environment abroad underperforms in a child who has had 10 infections before the age of 2. The problem was never the vaccine. It was what the child's gut had already been through.
Then she went further than diagnosis.
Rotavirus is the leading cause of severe diarrhoea in small children and it kills a very large number of them. India had access to imported rotavirus vaccines, but they were expensive and often out of reach for the families who needed them most.
Kang led the clinical trials for Rotavac, India's first indigenous rotavirus vaccine, made by an Indian company. She was also central to the work behind a second one, Rotasiil.
Both are now approved by the World Health Organisation. Rotavac went into India's national immunisation programme, which means it reaches children whose parents pay nothing for it.
In 2019 she became the first Indian woman scientist working in India to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, the scientific body founded in London in 1660. It took 359 years.
She has served on the World Health Organisation's global advisory committee on vaccine safety, and she now leads global health work at one of the largest health foundations in the world.
She built her career on a question most people did not think was worth asking.
Not how do we get vaccines to poor children. But why do they not work as well when they get there.
I was a proud member of COMA, Calcutta Old Monks Association in Joka. Now the whole campus life seems like a lie…
Wow !
All along, Old Monk hasn't been a rum at all, but a "rum flavoured spirit", based not on sugarcane juice or by-products, but a cheap, neutral base spirit, caramel colouring & additives to pass it off as a dark aromatic rum ?!?
share.google/uItsdJnUCLSHS89…
