model-optimization
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Viraat Das
Viraat Das is the cofounder and CEO of Exla, a Y Combinator (Winter 2025) startup building AI infrastructure. A former Amazon machine learning engineer who finished his Purdue computer science degree in two and a half years, he first shipped an SDK that squeezes large transformer models onto edge hardware like NVIDIA Jetsons, then aimed the company at Libra, an always-on AI site reliability engineer that reads production logs, traces failures to the deploy that caused them, and opens fix pull requests while the team sleeps.
Exla
Exla (YC W25) is a San Francisco startup building Libra, an AI site-reliability engineer that watches production logs, traces and deploys around the clock. When something breaks, Libra detects the failure, finds the deploy that caused it, opens a fix pull request with a regression test, and verifies recovery in production - so engineers do not have to wake up at 3am. The company began as an SDK for running large transformer models on edge devices and pivoted to autonomous incident response.
Osmosis
Osmosis is a San Francisco reinforcement learning platform (YC W25) that helps companies fine-tune open-source models to beat foundation models on cost, latency, and reliability. Founded by Kasey Zhang and Andy Lyu, it lets teams train task-specific AI agents with multi-turn tool use over the Model Context Protocol, then export or self-host the weights they own.
ModelCat AI
ModelCat AI, formerly the low-power chip pioneer Eta Compute, builds an agentic, hardware-aware platform that automatically designs, trains, optimizes and validates machine-learning models for embedded, edge and IoT devices. Its patented AI-in-the-Loop workflow, backed by a physical hardware farm that calibrates results against real silicon, compresses a model-development cycle that once took 12 to 24 months down to a matter of days. The Sunnyvale company works with chipmakers including NXP and Alif Semiconductor to hand developers ready-to-run models tuned to the exact constraints of the hardware they will run on.