# Paroma Varma

> Paroma Varma is a co-founder and Head of Solutions at Snorkel AI, the $1.3B data-centric AI platform she helped build from a Stanford AI Lab research project into a unicorn serving Fortune 500 enterprises. Holding a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford, she pioneered weak supervision techniques that reduce AI training data preparation from months to days, enabling domain experts in healthcare, finance, and government to build state-of-the-art ML models without massive labeled datasets.

- **Role:** Co-Founder & Head of Solutions at Snorkel AI
- **Organizations:** Snorkel AI, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Meta (Facebook), Intel
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, UC Berkeley
- **Known for:** Co-founded Snorkel AI, now valued at $1.3 billion (Series D, May 2025), NSF Graduate Research Fellowship recipient, Stanford Graduate Fellowship recipient

## Career timeline

- **~2010-2014** — B.S. in EECS at UC Berkeley; worked in neuroscience and computational imaging labs
- **2014-2019** — Ph.D. at Stanford University (EE), advised by Prof. Christopher Ré; DAWN, SAIL, and StatML groups; NSF Graduate Research Fellow
- **2015** — Joined the Snorkel research project at Stanford AI Lab as one of its first contributors
- **2018** — Published 'Snuba: Automating weak supervision to label training data' (227 citations)
- **2019** — Co-founded Snorkel AI (with Alex Ratner, Chris Ré, Braden Hancock, Henry Ehrenberg)
- **2020** — Snorkel AI launches publicly, raises Series A; named Head of Research
- **2021** — Invited keynote speaker at ICLR Workshop on Weakly Supervised Learning
- **2022** — Head of Solutions role; Snorkel AI raises Series C at $1B+ valuation
- **2023** — Speaks at 2023 Enterprise LLM Summit; Snorkel expands into LLM fine-tuning and evaluation
- **2025** — Snorkel AI raises $100M Series D at $1.3B valuation; launches Snorkel Evaluate and Expert Data-as-a-Service

## Achievements

- Co-founded Snorkel AI, now valued at $1.3 billion (Series D, May 2025)
- NSF Graduate Research Fellowship recipient
- Stanford Graduate Fellowship recipient
- Invited keynote speaker at ICLR 2021 (Workshop on Weakly Supervised Learning)
- Co-authored 'Snuba: Automating weak supervision to label training data' (VLDB 2018, 227 citations)
- Co-authored 'Training Classifiers with Natural Language Explanations' (ACL 2018, 192 citations)
- Over 3,789 total academic citations; h-index of 16
- Applied weak supervision to clinical MRI analysis, published in Nature Communications
- Pioneered domain-specific primitives for image-based weak supervision
- Helped grow Snorkel AI to 1,200+ employees and $148M annual revenue

## Latest updates

- **2025-05** — Snorkel AI raises $100M Series D at $1.3B valuation, led by Addition with participation from Greylock and Lightspeed
- **2025-05** — Snorkel launches Snorkel Evaluate (AI model evaluation) and Snorkel Expert Data-as-a-Service products
- **2024-01** — Appeared at SnorkelCon 2024, Snorkel AI's annual enterprise AI conference
- **2023-11** — Expert panelist at 2023 Enterprise LLM Summit (YouTube)
- **2023-09** — Featured in Microsoft AI interview series on keeping pace with AI development

## Links

- Website: https://snorkel.ai
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/paromavarma
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/paroma_varma
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvZgoZehtgg
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/snorkelai/about

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/paroma-varma
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-05-24