# Robert Nishihara

> Robert Nishihara is a co-founder of Anyscale, the company commercializing Ray - the open-source distributed computing framework powering AI workloads at OpenAI, Apple, Uber, and thousands of other organizations. A Harvard math grad and UC Berkeley PhD, he built Ray during his doctoral research to solve the tooling bottlenecks he personally experienced doing AI research. Anyscale has raised $259.6M and reached a $1B+ valuation under his leadership before he transitioned from CEO to a product-focused role in mid-2024.

- **Role:** Co-Founder at Anyscale
- **Organizations:** Anyscale, UC Berkeley RISELab, UC Berkeley AMPLab, Ray Project
- **From:** San Francisco Bay Area, United States
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** BA in Mathematics, Harvard University, PhD in Computer Science, UC Berkeley
- **Known for:** Co-created Ray, the open-source distributed computing framework used by OpenAI, Apple, Uber, Canva, Instacart, Amazon, and Pinterest, Co-founded Anyscale, achieving $1B+ valuation and $259.6M in total funding, Ray has over 1,000 open-source contributors and is used by 10,000+ organizations globally

## Career timeline

- **2009-2013** — Studied Mathematics at Harvard University
- **2013-2019** — PhD in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, working in AMPLab/RISELab under Michael Jordan and Ion Stoica
- **2017** — Published original Ray paper (arXiv:1712.05889), co-authored with Philipp Moritz and Ion Stoica
- **2018** — Ray presented at USENIX OSDI 2018, gaining major academic recognition
- **2019** — Co-founded Anyscale with Philipp Moritz and Ion Stoica to commercialize Ray
- **2022** — Anyscale raised $99M Series C led by Addition and Intel Capital; Ray 2.0 announced at Ray Summit
- **2024** — Transitioned from CEO to product-focused co-founder role; Keerti Melkote appointed CEO
- **2025** — Active speaker at KubeCon, PyTorch Conference; Anyscale ARR reaches ~$111.9M
- **2026** — Speaking at HumanX SF and Dubai AI Festival; continues driving Anyscale product strategy

## Achievements

- Co-created Ray, the open-source distributed computing framework used by OpenAI, Apple, Uber, Canva, Instacart, Amazon, and Pinterest
- Co-founded Anyscale, achieving $1B+ valuation and $259.6M in total funding
- Ray has over 1,000 open-source contributors and is used by 10,000+ organizations globally
- Published landmark paper 'Ray: A Distributed Framework for Emerging AI Applications' (OSDI 2018)
- Scaled Anyscale from founding team to 400+ employees
- Ray scales to over 1.8 million tasks per second
- Grew Anyscale to ~$111.9M ARR
- Completed SF Half Marathon

## Latest updates

- **2026-04** — Spoke at HumanX conference in San Francisco
- **2026-04** — Scheduled speaker at Dubai AI Festival 2026
- **2025-11** — Spoke at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2025 on 'Open Source AI Compute with Kubernetes, Ray, PyTorch, and vLLM'
- **2025-10** — Spoke at PyTorch Conference 2025 on open-source post-training stack
- **2024-08** — Invested in Letta startup
- **2024-07** — Transitioned from CEO to product-focused co-founder role; Keerti Melkote appointed CEO of Anyscale

## Links

- Website: https://www.robertnishihara.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-nishihara-b6465444
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/robertnishihara
- GitHub: https://github.com/robertnishihara

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/robert-nishihara
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-05-23