Arjun Maheswaran

I'm the co-founder and CEO of Rowboat Labs (YC S24).

We build Rowboat, an open-source team of AI coworkers. It has 18,000+ GitHub stars, in the top 0.01% of projects on GitHub.

I believe AI agents will soon outnumber the people in most companies. Rowboat is the infrastructure for them to collaborate safely, with humans in the control seat.

I've been shipping machine learning to production since 2012, from Twitter's first realtime spam models to training LLMs with reinforcement learning in 2020. I previously co-founded Agara AI, which Coinbase acquired. I hold 7 AI patents.

Timeline

• 2008
  Researched trust in social networks in theoretical computer science. Georgia Tech
• 2009
  Built a tool to cluster web domains for ad planning during an engineering co-op. Google
• 2012
  Joined Twitter's Anti-spam team as a founding ML engineer. Twitter
• 2013
  Became tech lead for spam ML and built Twitter's first realtime spam detection models, as spam became a top company priority ahead of its IPO. Twitter MarTech · Patent
• 2015
  Built Twitter's first realtime deep learning models for abuse detection, spam detection, and topics as a founding NLP engineer on Cortex. Twitter
• 2016
  Helped test torch-autograd in production before its open-source release. It was an early automatic differentiation library that inspired PyTorch's autograd. Twitter GitHub
• Supervised the intern project that became torch-twrl, a reinforcement learning framework for Torch using OpenAI Gym. Twitter GitHub
• 2017
  Co-founded Agara AI as CTO, backed by Kleiner Perkins. Agara
• 2018
  Built 100M+ parameter deep learning models with attention layers, powering email support for several global brands. Agara
• 2019
  Published EMNLP research using GPT-1 for controlled text generation. Agara ACL Anthology
• 2020
  Patented methods for training GPT-2 class LLMs with reinforcement learning, beating state-of-the-art style transfer systems by 21% in human evaluation. Agara arXiv
• Expanded into voice support. Every live support call to all P&G brands in North America, including Pampers and Gillette, was handled with Agara's realtime agent assist. Agara VentureBeat
• 2021
  Coinbase acquired Agara for its deep learning technology. Agara Coinbase
• Led deep learning efforts as a Senior Staff ML Engineer. Coinbase
• 2022
  Coinbase's support chatbot launched, built on Agara's technology. Coinbase
• 2023
  Conceived and mentored RiskSEA, a graph machine learning system for detecting fraudulent addresses across Ethereum at scale. Coinbase arXiv
• 2024
  Co-founded Rowboat Labs as CEO, backed by Y Combinator (S24). Rowboat
• 2025
  Launched Rowboat IDE, an open-source tool to orchestrate multi-agent systems. Rowboat Hacker News
• Launched RowboatX, an open-source CLI for running background agents on everyday tasks. Rowboat Hacker News
• 2026
  Launched Rowboat, a desktop AI coworker that builds a knowledge graph of your work. Rowboat Hacker News
• Launched work surfaces for email, meeting notes, and a browser, where Rowboat acts on that knowledge. Rowboat Hacker News
• Expanding Rowboat into a team of AI coworkers that work together. Rowboat GitHub