Who are Skild AI's decision-makers?

Deepak Pathak is CEO and the more publicly visible co-founder. He holds a PhD from UC Berkeley (AI / Machine Learning) and a BS with Gold Medal in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur, and pioneered the concept of 'artificial curiosity' in reinforcement learning — a framework that enables robots to explore their environment and acquire skills without human-designed reward functions, now a foundational idea in robot learning research. Before founding Skild, he was a research scientist at Facebook AI Research (FAIR) and Google, and co-founded VisageMap Inc., which was acquired by FaceFirst Inc. He was named to MIT Technology Review's '35 Innovators Under 35,' received a Sloan Research Fellowship and Okawa Research Award, and has won multiple Best Paper Awards at ICRA and CoRL — the top robotics conferences globally.

Abhinav Gupta is President and drives the technical architecture and research direction of the Skild Brain platform. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland (2009) and his undergraduate degree from IIT Kanpur — the same undergraduate institution as Pathak. He held a joint appointment as Associate Professor at CMU's Robotics Institute and School of Computer Science before co-founding Skild, and was a founding research scientist at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). His published research on large-scale unsupervised visual learning, robotic manipulation at scale, and locomotion forms the direct scientific lineage of Skild's approach to training on internet-scale video data and synthetic simulation. Both founders retain CMU academic affiliations, giving Skild privileged access to CMU's robotics PhD pipeline and the university's own participation as a seed-round investor.

Both Pathak and Gupta appeared together on CBS News in early 2026 — a signal of Skild's growing mainstream profile and the founders' dual roles as company leaders and technical evangelists for physical AI.

Given the company's size (~64–100 employees as of mid-2026), buying committees are compact and founder-led. For strategic infrastructure decisions — GPU and cloud compute, simulation tooling, data pipeline infrastructure, and model training platforms — Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta are directly involved as technical decision-makers and budget owners. The founders have publicly discussed their use of HPE Cray XD670 systems with NVIDIA HGX H200 for training, NVIDIA Isaac Lab and Isaac Sim for simulation, and STN's GPU One platform at CoreSite's CH2 Chicago data center for GPU-as-a-service inference and burst compute.

For talent acquisition and people-related tooling (ATS, HRIS, recruiter tools), Miriam Elmasry (Head of Talent Acquisition) owns the procurement decision. She was previously a Senior Technical Recruiter at Tesla (Autopilot and Tesla Bot / Optimus divisions) and at Uber before joining Skild, and has been responsible for recruiting across the AI labs of Meta, Google, Tesla, Amazon, and NVIDIA. For OEM partnerships and enterprise customer contracts, Deepak Pathak drives the relationship at the CEO level, as evidenced by his personal role in announcing the ABB, Universal Robots, Foxconn, and Zebra deals. There is no publicly named CFO, CRO, or VP of Sales as of June 2026 — sellers should engage directly with the founders or use press@skild.ai and hello@skild.ai to initiate contact.

Skild operates with a flat, research-lab-influenced organizational structure typical of AI foundation model companies at this stage. The founding team combines pure research leadership (Pathak on model architecture and generalization, Gupta on robot learning at scale) with entrepreneurial experience from prior company-building, and has recruited primarily from Big Tech AI labs to staff engineering, data, simulation, and platform teams.

The April 2026 acquisition of Zebra's Robotics Automation unit and its Symmetry Fulfillment software is Skild's first meaningful organizational integration challenge: absorbing the Symmetry product and its enterprise customer relationships will likely necessitate a dedicated head of enterprise product for the fleet management layer — a near-term hiring signal for sellers of enterprise software tools and professional services. As the company targets consumer robotics further out, expect a consumer product function to be added in the 2027–2028 timeframe as the Skild Brain's capabilities mature into home and light-commercial robot embodiments. Greenhouse ATS is confirmed as the recruiting infrastructure, with job postings at job-boards.greenhouse.io/skildai-careers spanning both Pittsburgh-based and remote roles.