# Samurdhi Karunaratne

> Samurdhi Karunaratne, also known as Sam Karu, is the San Francisco-based co-founder and CEO of Logical, a proactive desktop AI copilot in Y Combinator’s Fall 2025 batch. A Sri Lankan physics Olympiad silver medalist and computer-engineering graduate of the University of Peradeniya, he earned an M.S. at UCLA, conducted wireless-AI research, and worked on NVIDIA’s TensorRT before founding Logical with childhood friend Anushka Idamekorala.

- **Role:** Co-founder & CEO at Logical
- **Organizations:** Logical, NVIDIA, UCLA CORES Lab, Qualcomm, Nokia Bell Labs, Team biteCode
- **Nationality:** Sri Lankan
- **Education:** B.Sc. in Computer Engineering, First Class Honors, University of Peradeniya, M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, Dharmaraja College, Kandy
- **Known for:** Silver medal, 2014 International Physics Olympiad; rank 48 in the archived results., Silver medal, 2014 Asian Physics Olympiad., Gold medal, Sri Lankan Physics Olympiad, 2013.

## Career timeline

- **2013** — Won gold at the Sri Lankan Physics Olympiad.
- **2014** — Won silver medals at the Asian and International Physics Olympiads.
- **2015** — Formed competitive programming Team biteCode.
- **2017-2018** — Research internship at Nokia Bell Labs in Antwerp, supervised by Haris Gacanin.
- **2019** — Graduated from Peradeniya and began graduate research at UCLA under Danijela Cabric.
- **2021** — Wireless Systems R&D research internship at Qualcomm; completed an M.S. at UCLA.
- **2022-01** — Joined NVIDIA to work on the TensorRT deep-learning inference optimizer.
- **2023-11** — Received a President’s Award for Scientific Research from Sri Lanka’s National Research Council.
- **2024-2025** — Senior Software Engineer at NVIDIA, including leadership of the TensorRT custom-layer plugin framework.
- **2025-09** — Left NVIDIA and founded Logical with Anushka Idamekorala.
- **2025-10** — Logical was accepted into Y Combinator’s Fall 2025 batch.
- **2025-12** — Logical was accepted into NVIDIA Inception.
- **2026-07** — Co-authored an arXiv preprint on rank-23 multiplication of 3x3 matrices with Idamekorala.

## Achievements

- Silver medal, 2014 International Physics Olympiad; rank 48 in the archived results.
- Silver medal, 2014 Asian Physics Olympiad.
- Gold medal, Sri Lankan Physics Olympiad, 2013.
- IFS Gold Medal for best performance in Computer Engineering, University of Peradeniya, 2019.
- First Class Honors and a 4.00/4.00 undergraduate GPA at Peradeniya, as reported in his CV.
- Team biteCode won ACES Coders v6.0 and the Sri Lankan section of IEEEXtreme 10.0 in 2016.
- President’s Award for Scientific Research, Sri Lanka, November 2023.
- Co-founded Logical, accepted into Y Combinator Fall 2025.
- Co-author of WiSig, a publicly available WiFi signal dataset.

## Latest updates

- **2026-07** — Co-authored the July 28 arXiv preprint “55 Additions Suffice for 3x3 Matrix Multiplication at Rank 23” with Anushka Idamekorala.
- **2026-07** — Daily FT reported Logical’s YC acceptance and more than LKR 150 million in initial funding on July 15; the acceptance itself occurred in 2025.
- **2025-12** — Reported Logical’s admission to the NVIDIA Inception Program.

## Links

- Website: https://samurdhi.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samurdhilbk
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/SamKaru_
- GitHub: https://github.com/samurdhilbk

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/samurdhi-karunaratne
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-10-12