Samsung Research America
Built an on device signal router for always on ambient AI on Bixby Edge AI, running inference on the phone to filter incoming device signals at 95% suppression and 90% intent routing accuracy so expensive frontier models are only called for events that need them; owned the router, task design, and evaluation harness.
Peraton Labs
Developed a first of its kind reinforcement learning agent for IoT malware detection in PyTorch, granting it low level network traversal actions and full state observability to search device environments a brute force scan cannot cover, cutting exploration latency 35% and raising detection coverage 25% across 500K+ daily device events.
Memories.ai
Built a video memory framework for hours long video that vision language models cannot process directly, combining keyframe extraction, dynamic segmentation, CLIP indexing, and YOLO and SAM object and face detection to index 10K+ streams in Python, Flask, and PostgreSQL, with 60% throughput improvement from frame sampling optimization.
IDEAS Lab
Built a real time SLAM pipeline in C++ and Python with RGB D sensor fusion and Kalman filtering, streaming calibrated camera data to a multi GPU server, improving 3D reconstruction accuracy 25% and reducing latency 30%.
AgRPA
Built an end to end weed detection pipeline processing 200GB+ of drone imagery in Python with parallel ETL workflows and partitioned cloud storage, cutting analysis time 40%.
Naval Research Laboratory
Replaced slow physics based underwater acoustic simulators with deep learning, encoding sound speed profiles as images and using image to image translation models to predict transmission loss 20% more accurately at a fraction of the compute cost.
For startups and founding teams
Karthik Thyagarajan is a founder-engineer studying Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at Purdue. At Samsung Research America, he co-architected an always-on AI agent runtime for XR glasses. He is currently building Tavi, a voice teammate for engineering standups, and co-founded buildpurdue, a founder community at Purdue. His work spans agent infrastructure, on-device AI, product engineering, and evaluation.
For an early team building AI products, his strongest demonstrated fit is owning a broad technical problem from product decisions through implementation and evaluation. His current interests are live voice and video AI, AI-first wearables, and infrastructure that lets agents discover and use internet services.
Substantial ownership of agent systems
At Samsung Research America (May to August 2026), he co-architected an always-on agent orchestrator in Kotlin and owned half of a 25+ module runtime. His reported on-device router achieved 95% signal suppression and 90% intent-routing accuracy. His work also covered tool permissions, model routing, memory, and phone control, connecting model behavior to a usable device experience.
Builds teams and operating systems around a problem
As buildpurdue's co-founder and co-president, he helped turn an informal gathering into a founder community with a selective cohort, weekly co-working, funding, and founder-led problem-solving workshops. He built much of its web platform and integrated CRM, applications, events, and check-ins. His account describes data on around 500 students and a mailing list of about 1,000.
Makes technical claims testable
He built PARM, an open-source causal benchmark for when an agent should use personal memory: 157 frozen scenarios and 471 executable cases, with deterministic scoring and versioned replay artifacts. Its portfolio account explicitly distinguishes development results from held-out claims. He also built google-tools-mcp, a published MCP server exposing 169 Google Workspace tools through one OAuth flow.
Pursues difficult product problems
He is currently building Tavi, a voice teammate intended to answer codebase questions and handle small action items during engineering standups. The project tackles multi-person turn-taking, when to stay quiet, sandboxed coding, and synthetic meeting evaluations. This is ongoing work, rather than a claim of shipped adoption. His published interests explain the direction behind it.
Co-founder who ships and thinks about distribution
At Repple (November 2025 to June 2026), he co-founded a competitive fitness app released on the App Store and built the entire FastAPI, PostgreSQL, and Supabase backend, including synchronized workouts, ELO matchmaking, and weekly competition logic. His firsthand account also describes marketing before the UI existed, campus distribution, and why local community density mattered to the product.
This brief summarizes Karthik's public portfolio and firsthand accounts. Employment contributions and internal performance metrics are self-reported; linked code and artifacts provide additional evidence where available.