I'm Dhruva. I take the things I love and turn them into things I build - and lately, into research that checks whether those things actually work.

Right now that's machines and human movement. I wanted a training partner that could watch my jiu-jitsu rolls and tell me what really happened, so I built one - kakashi.ai - and then spent months finding out exactly where the models fall apart. That became my first paper, accepted at CAISc 2026. Since then I've been doing independent research on measuring how two people engage - where they touch, how their limbs wrap, how far apart they really are - in 3D and over time, from one ordinary camera. Vision first, and down the line, robots that can understand and work with people. There's a decade of work in there I want to sink my teeth into.

Before this I was the founding AI engineer at Zopu.ai, where we turned drawings into working products for people who don't write prompts, and grew to about 200,000 daily users. Before that I founded Dehidden, building Web3 products for brands like Adidas x Prada and Mercedes, until Polygon acquired us and merged us with their eDAO to form Layer-E. And before that I spent four years in the US at PwC as an enterprise architect, after a master's in computer science (machine learning and game theory) at Syracuse University and a bachelor's at BNM Institute of Technology in Bangalore.

In 2024 I took a year off and trained jiu-jitsu six hours a day, six days a week. Competed twice. Even on a break I need something to obsess over, and I wanted it to be my health and something I could keep learning for the rest of my life.

If there's a pattern, it's that the things I love don't stay hobbies for long. Jiu-jitsu became Kakashi and a paper. Music became pushit.tv, and a list of 265 bands I've seen live that keeps growing. I sow seeds and play long games.

I'm based in Bangalore, open to relocating, and open to research and to work - say hi.