About

Hi, I’m Shorya Link to heading

I grew up in a small town in Uttarakhand, went to boarding school in Nainital, and somehow ended up at IIT Kanpur doing a Double Major in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (CGPA 9.7). Somewhere along the way, I got genuinely obsessed with how things work — not just software, but everything: cells, circuits, markets, language, physics.

I’m a founder and engineer, currently building at the intersection of AI systems, edge computing, and product. Most recently:

• Protago AI — Built a full personalised storybook pipeline: Flux diffusion models + LoRA fine-tuning on Modal + a BFS face-swap pipeline to put the child’s face on the characters. Deployed to production, hit ₹50k+ revenue in two months.
• iCurious AI — CTO of a hardware AI companion for kids. Built real-time voice AI (STT + LLM + TTS) deployed on edge hardware, a persistent memory architecture that tracks each child’s interests and conversation history across sessions, and a Socratic questioning pipeline that guides curiosity rather than just answering. Secured 12L+ in government grants (NIDHI Prayas, MeitY).

Before founding, I was at Databricks on the Observability Platform team — drove $5M in annual cost savings, improved HMR reliability from 90% to 99%, and joined as the first member of the Bengaluru team.

On the research side: I published NICraft at ESORICS 2025 (a cache side-channel attack via malicious NIC firmware, done at CISPA Helmholtz Center with Prof. Christian Rossow) and worked on HIWE at the University of Toronto with Prof. Nandita Vijaykumar — a scene importance-weighted encoding for NeRF that adaptively allocates model capacity to high-detail scene regions.

I also contributed a correctness fix to Bitcoin Core (ancestor/descendant tracking in the ComplexMempool benchmark), back when I was deep into the Bitcoin rabbit hole and started Blockchain Circles at IITK.

Outside of building things: I read a lot — biology, mathematics, physics, philosophy of mind, whatever I’ve impulse-bought recently. I find most interesting ideas live at the edges of disciplines. I swim. I’m drawn to questions that don’t have clean answers yet.

I’m AIR 834 in JEE Advanced, Codeforces 1996 (top 200 Indians), and received the Databricks US offer — the only one from IIT Kanpur that year. I say this not as credentials but as signals that I like hard problems and tend to go all-in on the ones I care about.

If you have something interesting on your mind, ping me. I’m always up for a good conversation.

“Permit yourself to open a book and start reading from anywhere.” — Manuel Blum