Jeevan Kalanithi

ISEA2008

I’m a technology executive, technologist and entrepreneur. My background is in artificial intelligence, drones and cameras, management and leadership, and product design. My first startup Sifteo – co-founded with David Merrill and based on our graduate work from MIT and our TED talk – was acquired by North America’s largest drone company, 3D Robotics, in 2014. At 3DR, I served as VP Product, Chief Product Officer, and President. I spent time at Lux Capital, a VC firm with ~$2B under management, before starting my second company, OpenSpace.

My and my teams’ work has been featured in TED, The New York Times, WIRED and more; our products have been sold in boutique retail (NY’s MoMA store), large format retail nationally and globally (Best Buy, Toys R Us, Amazon); I have worked on art projects shown at the MoMA, SFMoMA, Oslo Philharmonic, Paris’ Villette Numerique and the Miami Museum of Art. I have run teams from 1 to >100 people, and partnered with companies such as Nickelodeon, Sony and Autodesk to launch and sell products globally at scale. I am an alumnus of MIT (graduate work at the Media Lab), Stanford (BS in Symbolic Systems), and the Screen Actors Guild (no, I’m not a good actor).