# Pavan Kalyan Tankala

> Pavan Kalyan Tankala, known as PK, is co-founder and CEO of TensorTest, formerly Ritivel, a San Francisco company in Y Combinator’s Winter 2026 batch. An IIT Bombay graduate and former Microsoft Research researcher, he has co-authored work on expressive speech synthesis, pragmatic language understanding, vision-language evaluation and continual learning. TensorTest builds evaluations, reinforcement-learning environments and training data for creative AI agents, starting with video editing.

- **Role:** Co-founder & CEO at TensorTest (formerly Ritivel)
- **Organizations:** TensorTest (formerly Ritivel), Microsoft Research, IIT Bombay, Robert Bosch Global Software Technologies
- **Education:** Integrated BTech in Electrical Engineering and MTech in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (CMiNDS), Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
- **Known for:** Cargill Global Scholarship (2020), listed in his personal CV., Co-founder of a company admitted to Y Combinator Winter 2026., Co-authored published research at Interspeech, EACL, ACL Findings, NeurIPS and the BabyLM Workshop.

## Career timeline

- **2019-2024** — Studied for an integrated BTech and MTech at IIT Bombay.
- **2020** — Received the Cargill Global Scholarship, as recorded in his personal CV.
- **2022** — Software development internship at Robert Bosch Global Software Technologies, May-July.
- **2023** — Co-authored Narrator or Character at Interspeech.
- **2024** — Co-authored STORiCo at EACL, PUB at ACL Findings and WikiDO at NeurIPS.
- **2024-2025** — Research Fellow at Microsoft Research; worked on language-model training.
- **2025** — Co-founded Ritivel with Nirmit Arora and Gunin Gupta; co-authored CurLL.
- **2026** — Company joined YC W26 and is now listed as TensorTest.
- **2026-09** — Co-authored the Timeline-Bench preprint, submitted September 28.

## Achievements

- Cargill Global Scholarship (2020), listed in his personal CV.
- Co-founder of a company admitted to Y Combinator Winter 2026.
- Co-authored published research at Interspeech, EACL, ACL Findings, NeurIPS and the BabyLM Workshop.
- Co-authored Timeline-Bench, a 56-task benchmark for video-editing agents.

## Latest updates

- **2026-09** — Co-authored Timeline-Bench, submitted to arXiv on September 28, with Gunin Gupta and Nirmit Arora.
- **2026-10** — As checked on October 12, YC and the company website identify him as CEO of TensorTest, formerly Ritivel. This is a verification date, not an announced rebranding date.

## Links

- Website: https://tpavankalyan.github.io/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tankalapavankalyan/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/tpavankalyan23
- GitHub: https://github.com/tpavankalyan

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/pavan-kalyan-tankala
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-10-12