My name is Vinoo and I’m the CEO & Co-Founder of Kepler, the AI platform for financial services, where every answer traces back to its source filing, page, and line item. We’re a team of engineers from Palantir, Citadel, Meta, Stanford, and PhysicsX, backed by founders of OpenAI, Facebook AI, MotherDuck, dbt, Outerbounds, and others.
Before Kepler, I was Head of Business Engineering for Ashler at Citadel, CTO of Veraset (a geospatial data-as-a-service startup processing 2+ TB daily for 80+ customers), and started my career at Palantir, where I worked on its search and indexing backend, managed its Spark/YARN compute platform, and designed Project Frontline, the program for scaling Palantir’s Forward Deployed Engineering team.
I teach data engineering, dbt, AI engineering, and forward deployed engineering on LinkedIn Learning, advise a handful of startups, and serve on Washington University’s McKelvey Engineering National Council and Alumni Board of Governors.
A lot of my recent work is about Forward Deployed Engineering: the definitive guide to the role, an essay for Latent Space on why most FDE functions are really consulting teams, a conversation with Business Insider about what companies get wrong, and a talk on how we run it at Kepler. I’m one of the fellows in a16z’s Forward Deployed Engineer Fellowship.
I write about data engineering, AI, and building systems in my writing, and share talks & courses and projects I’ve built. See what I’m up to now.
Drop me a note. Would love to chat.