Kartikesh Mishra

Kartikesh Mishra is a Nepali computer scientist and co-founder/CTO of Lamina Labs, a San Francisco startup in Y Combinator's Spring 2026 batch building near-real-time structured video generation; its first product, Simi, turns prompts and documents into whiteboard-style explainer videos. He studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, earning a BSc and a Master of Engineering in Computer Science before moving to San Francisco. At MIT he was a graduate research assistant at CSAIL under Prof. Daniela Rus (multimodal drone navigation with reinforcement learning and vision-language models) and taught Intro to Machine Learning (6.3900) and Advances in Computer Vision (6.8300/1). As a high-school student in Nepal he represented the country at the 2019 International Mathematical Olympiad in Bath, scoring 9 points and earning an Honourable Mention - the top Nepali score on that team.

Notes6

• Co-founded Lamina Labs (YC Spring 2026) with Sudip Rokaya; Lamina builds near-real-time structured video generation and its first product Simi turns prompts/documents into whiteboard explainer videos.2026
• Represented Nepal at IMO 2019 (Bath, UK), scoring 9 points, ranked 417th (33rd percentile), earning an Honourable Mention - the top Nepali scorer on that team.Jul 2019
• As CTO of Lamina, frames their core technical problem as avoiding fine-tuning the pre-LLM-era animation library Manim, which he judged would cost millions of dollars to make accurate.2026
• Lamina Labs raised $3M (reported by Dealroom) after YC backing; a LinkedIn announcement cites $4.8M for 'understandable AI'.2026
• Studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT (BSc) and completed a Master of Engineering in Computer Science before relocating to San Francisco.2026
• Graduate research assistant at MIT CSAIL under Prof. Daniela Rus, working on multimodal drone navigation with reinforcement learning and vision-language foundation models.2025
• Founding Engineer at INFINIRATE, Inc. (2025-2026) building infrastructure for AI agent systems, before co-founding Lamina - a shift from agent infrastructure into AI video generation.2025
• Software Engineer at Abacus.AI (2026) between the agent-infrastructure role and Lamina Labs.2026
• Graduate Teaching Assistant for MIT 6.3900 (Intro to ML) and TA for 6.8300/1 (Advances in Computer Vision), plus an ML lab assistant for 6.036 as an undergrad.2024
• Personal site mk314k.github.io describes him as 'MIT EECS MEng' and hosts projects, resume and writing on AI/ML - mk314k is a consistent handle across LinkedIn, GitHub and his domain.