# 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.

- **Role:** Cofounder and CEO at Exla (YC W25)
- **Organizations:** Exla, Amazon, BoilerMake
- **Nationality:** United States
- **Education:** B.S. in Computer Science, Purdue University
- **Known for:** Cofounded and leads Exla, accepted into Y Combinator Winter 2025., Built an SDK that runs large transformer models on constrained edge hardware, cutting memory usage up to 80% with 3-20x faster inference., Developed Libra, an AI SRE agent that detects anomalies, correlates them to deploy windows, and opens fix pull requests automatically.

## Career timeline

- **2018** — Began B.S. in Computer Science at Purdue University; involved with BoilerMake, Purdue's largest hackathon.
- **2020** — Graduated from Purdue in roughly two and a half years.
- **2020** — Joined Amazon as a machine learning engineer, working on personalized search and infrastructure to optimize models.
- **2025** — Cofounded Exla with Pranav Nair; accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch.
- **2025** — Raised a seed round (reported at $130K) around March 2025.
- **2025** — Shipped the Exla SDK to run transformer models on edge devices, cutting memory use up to 80% with 3-20x faster inference.
- **2025** — Directed Exla toward Libra, an autonomous AI site reliability engineer that monitors production and opens fix PRs.

## Achievements

- Cofounded and leads Exla, accepted into Y Combinator Winter 2025.
- Built an SDK that runs large transformer models on constrained edge hardware, cutting memory usage up to 80% with 3-20x faster inference.
- Developed Libra, an AI SRE agent that detects anomalies, correlates them to deploy windows, and opens fix pull requests automatically.
- Completed a Purdue computer science degree in about two and a half years.
- Worked on personalized search and model-optimization infrastructure at Amazon.
- Prolific open-source builder with hundreds of public GitHub repositories.

## Latest updates

- **2025-03** — Exla went through Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch and closed a seed round.
- **2025-06** — Opened Exla's GPU and optimization work to early beta users, offering credits for feedback.
- **2025** — Focused the company on Libra, an always-on AI site reliability engineer that lives in Slack and is queryable over MCP.

## Links

- Website: https://exla.ai
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/viraatdas
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/therealviraat
- GitHub: https://github.com/viraatdas
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/viraat.das

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/viraat-das
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-07-31