Karthik Srinivasan

There's a GitHub repository called SprayLearning - 154 stars, written in Scala, sitting quietly on the internet since before most AI founders had ever heard the word "LLM." That project is a decent window into how Karthik Srinivasan operates: build something useful, make it open, don't wait for permission.

Today Karthik is the CTO of Studio at Forum Ventures in New York - a role that doesn't have a clean analogue anywhere else in venture. He's not an investor, exactly. Not a contractor, exactly. Not a startup CTO in the traditional sense. He's the person responsible for turning an idea, a domain expert, and a blank Jira board into a fundable AI company - sometimes in the same week.

Forum Ventures' AI Studio co-builds B2B companies from concept to company. The studio puts in $250K at formation, provides a full-stack team across product, engineering, design, and GTM, and hands founders majority ownership from day one. The model has already produced 17 companies, and 63% of them raised follow-on capital within 12 months. The person making that technically possible is Karthik.

The phrase "technical debt founders have to unwind later" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Most startup CTOs ship fast and hope the architecture holds. Most agencies ship clean and charge you for the extra weeks. Karthik's claim - and the studio's track record suggests it's not just a claim - is that you don't have to pick.

He has 20 years of source material to draw from. He started as a Senior Software Engineer at Travelocity in 2007, back when the cloud was still a metaphor and "full stack" meant knowing CSS and not hating it. He moved to Getty Images in 2010 and stayed six years - long enough to work at serious engineering scale, the kind where one bad deploy is a news story. In 2016, he made his own bet: co-founding Pixibo in Singapore, a conversational AI platform for personalized fashion fitting - years before the AI-native startup became the default ambition.

After Pixibo, he joined Zuva.ai as VP of Engineering, a contract AI company that helps businesses extract information from complex documents. It was the kind of role where you solve genuinely hard NLP problems before "NLP" became a party conversation. Then Forum Ventures came calling.

In a venture studio, the CTO role is less about maintaining a codebase and more about compression - taking all of the institutional knowledge of how software gets built, how startups fail, how MVPs turn into products, and making it available to founders who have deep domain expertise but may be building their first company. Karthik doesn't just write code; he writes the playbook.

His personal website - a sparse GitHub Pages site he's maintained since 2010 - is titled "Experiments, thoughts and scripts documented for posterity." That phrase says something. Most people clean up their digital trail as they climb. Karthik left his up. The blog posts are still there: AWS Lambda configurations, MongoDB schemas, Elasticsearch queries, WebSocket patterns. A real-time technical journal from the era when you had to figure this stuff out yourself.

The other detail his personal site volunteers: he's a beer enthusiast. Which, alongside 20 years of distributed systems work, tracks perfectly. Some people decompress with golf. Engineers who've spent two decades untangling infrastructure reach for something cold and physical at the end of the day.

Forum Ventures is aiming to launch 30 companies through its AI Studio. Each one runs through Karthik's playbook. Each one gets same-week MVPs and rapid validation cycles without the standard tradeoff between speed and sanity. That's the real product he's built - not the companies themselves, but the repeatable process for building them. In a world where every founder claims to move fast and break things, Karthik is quietly building the infrastructure that moves fast without breaking things.

That's a rarer skill than it sounds.