Varsha Raghavan

About

Senior technical leader and AI engineer with a decade of hands-on ML and software engineering experience and a successful exit as a founder. Built and shipped production AI systems across life sciences, energy infrastructure, and B2B SaaS, and advised founders, executives, and investors on AI strategy, governance, and implementation. Published foundational ML research at ICLR and holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Yale focused on applied AI/ML, including a fellowship in AI governance and technology ethics from Yale Law School’s Information Society Project.

Experience

• Product Lead, AI Software · Paces AI02-01-2026 – 05-01-2026

  • Led a focused 3 month AI product strategy engagement for an energy infrastructure intelligence company, defining the roadmap for geospatial ML systems used by developers, utilities, and project finance teams. • Architected the pivot from data platform to AI-forward product, designing multi-agent workflows using MCP, LLM toolchains, and intelligent document processing pipelines for permitting data, GIS records, and project documentation at scale. • Established governance and reliability frameworks for AI outputs consumed directly by executive teams and external clients, including uncertainty quantification and audit-trail documentation. • Navigated highly complex, multi-source datasets, normalizing across inconsistent schemas, establishing refresh cadences, and building preprocessing pipelines to make raw permitting, parcel, and grid data usable for AI model inputs.

• Co-Founder & CEO/CTO · Rue01-01-2023 – 02-01-2026

  • Served as both CEO and CTO across the company lifecycle, owning technical strategy, architecture, and product direction while leading fundraising, and investor relations. • Built the full-stack AI platform from the ground up: LLM-powered recommendation engine, two-sided marketplace infrastructure, and partner integrations serving 1,000+ enterprise and SMB clients including IBM, Silicon Valley Bank, Monday.com, and James Beard Foundation. • Architected production AI systems including LLM pipelines, embedding and vector search infrastructure, and retrieval-augmented generation; designed and deployed AI agent systems with end-to-end monitoring, telemetry, and observability. • Defined AI deployment standards across the full model lifecycle, from experimentation and evaluation through production rollout, performance monitoring, and continuous optimization. • Led AI product strategy across the full company lifecycle, including fundraising narrative, investor due diligence, and successful exit. • Managed a distributed global engineering team; established technical standards, sprint cadences, and code review processes across a remote organization.

• Machine Learning Engineer · Immunai08-01-2020 – 12-01-2022

  • Joined as the founding ML hire at a precision immunology company; built scRNA-seq analysis pipelines, graph neural networks, and generative models for drug target discovery. Grew with the company from seed stage to a $1.3B valuation. • Designed and deployed ML decision-support tools adopted directly by pharmaceutical partners under clinical timelines, translating complex model outputs into interpretable artifacts for non-technical domain experts. • Published SystemMatch (ICLR 2022, arXiv:2205.07110): a generative latent-space matching framework for single-cell perturbation modeling, now used as a benchmark for cellular representation learning.

• Chief Technology Officer · PPETrackr01-01-2020 – 09-01-2020

  • Built a real-time PPE inventory tracking platform deployed across hospital networks during the COVID-19 pandemic; owned backend architecture and deployment. • Licensed the platform as open source; worked directly with state governments including Washington, California, Connecticut, and New York to support emergency procurement tracking.

• Software Engineer · Lyft06-01-2019 – 09-01-2019

  • Worked on the privacy engineering team, building backend services and data infrastructure to enforce CCPA compliance across Lyft's data systems; contributed to reliability and observability tooling across distributed systems.

• Software Engineer · Cisco05-01-2018 – 09-01-2018

  • Built internal tooling and contributed to network infrastructure software.

Education

• Yale UniversityBachelor of Science, Computer Science (focused on applied AI/ML; fellowship in AI governance and technology ethics from Yale Law School's Information Society Project)

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