# Anand Kannappan

> Anand Kannappan is the co-founder and CEO of Patronus AI, a San Francisco AI research company working on evaluation, agent simulation and training data. A University of Chicago alumnus who previously worked on interpretability and causal inference at Meta and ran a quantitative hedge fund, he co-founded Patronus with Rebecca Qian in 2023. His co-authored research includes FinanceBench, Lynx, GLIDER, TRAIL and FigmaTrace.

- **Role:** Co-founder and CEO at Patronus AI
- **Organizations:** Patronus AI, Meta, Vertis, Kyber Technologies
- **Education:** The University of Chicago
- **Known for:** Co-founded Patronus AI with Rebecca Qian in 2023., Led Patronus through disclosed seed, Series A and Series B rounds totaling $70 million by June 2026., Co-authored publicly released AI evaluation research including FinanceBench, Lynx, GLIDER and TRAIL.

## Career timeline

- **Before Patronus AI** — Co-founded Kyber Technologies, which evolved into a quantitative futures hedge fund; worked at Vertis and Meta. Exact chronology is not established by the primary sources consulted.
- **2023** — Co-founded Patronus AI with Rebecca Qian; launched from stealth in September with $3 million in seed funding led by Lightspeed.
- **2023** — Co-authored FinanceBench.
- **2024** — Patronus announced a $17 million Series A in May; co-authored Lynx and GLIDER.
- **2025** — Co-authored TRAIL, a benchmark for debugging agent traces.
- **2026** — Patronus announced a $50 million Series B in June and previewed a Digital World Model; co-authored FigmaTrace and SpeedrunBench.

## Achievements

- Co-founded Patronus AI with Rebecca Qian in 2023.
- Led Patronus through disclosed seed, Series A and Series B rounds totaling $70 million by June 2026.
- Co-authored publicly released AI evaluation research including FinanceBench, Lynx, GLIDER and TRAIL.
- Recognized alongside Rebecca Qian in Forbes 30 Under 30 North America 2025, as confirmed by Qian’s public post.

## Latest updates

- **2026-09** — Published “Zeno’s Paradox in AI” on September 16, explaining Patronus’s original stealth name and his view of a moving AI evaluation frontier.
- **2026-09** — Co-authored SpeedrunBench, announced September 3, evaluating agents on speedrunning ten games.
- **2026-08** — Co-authored FigmaTrace, announced August 20, with 3,469 design trajectories and more than 200 hours of work.
- **2026-06** — Patronus announced a $50 million Series B led by Greenfield Partners and a Digital World Model preview on June 25.

## Links

- Website: https://anandkannappan.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anandnkannappan/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/anandnk24
- GitHub: https://github.com/anandnk24

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/anand-kannappan
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-10-26