Ishani Thakur

Born and raised in the Bay Area, Ishani attended MIT (Class of ’21) to study computer science (6-3). At school, she focused on ML research at CSAIL, specifically RL and robotics.

In industry, she researched mapping strategies at Lyft Level 5 and explainable models at Google in the AdsAI team. She was co-president of the ML club at MIT (AI@MIT) where she helped grow the organization and collaborated with amazing people. After the pandemic interrupted her time at MIT, she moved to London to intern at DeepMind in the robotics team, researching goal conditioned policies. Even though Ishani enjoys pure research, her true passion is company building.

Her interest in venture stemmed from working at startups, specifically her time at Confluent. She witnessed Confluent’s explosive growth and fell in love with the idea that technology can enable true transformation. When working in venture at Highland Capital in 2017 and then as a Pear fellow at MIT, she got hooked on working closely with founders.

Ishani believes in optimizing for impact. This is why she enjoys researching new technologies, building foundational products, and venture. She truly hopes that she can help as many people as possible build companies.