# Karttikeya Mangalam

> Karttikeya Mangalam is the Founder and CEO of SigIQ.ai, a Berkeley-based AI tutoring startup that raised $9.5M in seed funding to make elite-level, personalized education accessible globally. A PhD graduate from UC Berkeley's BAIR lab with 40+ published papers and 10,000+ citations, he grew up in Muzaffarpur, Bihar and built an AI tutor that set the all-time record on India's notoriously brutal UPSC civil service exam — scoring 175/200, beating 1.3 million candidates in under 7 minutes.

- **Role:** Founder & CEO at SigIQ.ai
- **Organizations:** SigIQ.ai, UC Berkeley BAIR, Meta AI, Google DeepMind, Stanford Vision Lab
- **From:** Muzaffarpur, Bihar, India
- **Nationality:** Indian
- **Education:** PhD, Computer Science (Computer Vision / AI), UC Berkeley (BAIR), MS, Computer Science (AI track, dropout), Stanford University, Semester Exchange, EPFL, Switzerland, B.Tech, Electrical Engineering (Minor: Machine Learning), Summa Cum Laude, IIT Kanpur
- **Known for:** Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2025 (Consumer & Enterprise Technology), KAUST AI Rising Star 2022, Honda YES Scholar 2017

## Career timeline

- **2014-2018** — B.Tech at IIT Kanpur, graduated summa cum laude with EE + ML minor
- **2018** — Semester exchange at EPFL, Switzerland; research with Prof. Pascal Fua and Dr. Mathieu Salzmann
- **2018-2019** — Master's student at Stanford Vision Lab, advised by Prof. Juan Carlos Niebles
- **2019** — Started PhD in Computer Vision at UC Berkeley BAIR, advised by Prof. Jitendra Malik
- **2019-2021** — Research internships at MILA (Yoshua Bengio), University of Tokyo, Toyota Research Institute, University of Warwick
- **2021-2023** — Visiting Researcher at Meta AI for ~2 years, collaborating with Dr. Christoph Feichtenhofer
- **2022** — Two CVPR oral presentations: Reversible Vision Transformers and MeMViT; named KAUST AI Rising Star
- **2023** — Completed PhD at UC Berkeley; co-founded SigIQ.ai in July 2023 with Prof. Kurt Keutzer
- **2024** — Launched PadhAI (UPSC prep); AI tutor scores 175/200 on UPSC Prelims — all-time record
- **2025-04** — SigIQ.ai exits stealth with $9.5M seed round; named Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2025
- **2025** — EverTutor.ai launches for GRE prep; 10,000+ users in 3 months; spoke at ASU GSV Summit

## Achievements

- Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2025 (Consumer & Enterprise Technology)
- KAUST AI Rising Star 2022
- Honda YES Scholar 2017
- 40+ published research papers at top-tier venues (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV)
- 10,000+ research citations
- Two CVPR 2022 oral presentations (Reversible Vision Transformers and MeMViT)
- SigIQ.ai AI tutor achieved 175/200 on UPSC Prelims — highest score in the exam's history
- PadhAI platform reached 200,000+ users within 6 months of launch
- Raised $9.5M seed round co-led by House Fund and GSV Ventures
- Graduated IIT Kanpur summa cum laude
- Mentored 10+ students who went on to Tesla, Apple, Amazon, Cruise, and Princeton

## Latest updates

- **2025-04** — SigIQ.ai emerged from stealth with $9.5M seed funding co-led by House Fund and GSV Ventures
- **2025-04** — Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2025 in Consumer & Enterprise Technology
- **2025-04** — Spoke at ASU GSV Summit as an education technology speaker
- **2025-01** — EverTutor.ai launched for GRE preparation, reaching 10,000+ users in 3 months
- **2024-06** — SigIQ.ai's AI tutor scored 175/200 on UPSC Prelims — the highest ever recorded in the exam's history

## Links

- Website: https://karttikeya.github.io/
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/karttikeya-mangalam-ph-d-9248a6110
- GitHub: https://github.com/karttikeya

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/karttikeya-mangalam
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-05-06