Shashank Padala
I build and ship AI products — and write about how they actually get built.
Founder, Kirak Labs · ex-Amazon TPM II · ex-Tesco · IIT Guwahati · Queen's University
Education & experience
Education
Queen's University, Smith School of Business
Masters in Management, Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati
Bachelor of Technology · Electronics & Communication Engineering
Experience
Founder · Kirak Labs Ltd (AI Dev Studio)
Apr 2025 – Present
Technical Program Manager II · Amazon
Sep 2022 – Apr 2025
TPM and Software Engineer · Tesco
Jul 2017 – Aug 2021
Awards & recognition
Hackathon wins, accelerator selections, and academic distinctions — 2017 to today.
Selected Founder — AI Accelerator Programs
Up to $300K in creditsGoogle for Startups & Microsoft for Startups
Accepted into both accelerators for Kirak Labs, securing up to $150,000 in AI and cloud credits from each program.
AI/ML and Vibe-Coding Workshop Host
Network School, Malaysia
Conceived, organized, and hosted workshops on Cursor, Claude Code, and Lovable for entrepreneurs and industry leaders at the startup ecosystem founded by Balaji Srinivasan.
Winner — DAO Proposal Management
$5,000 grantETH Global Hackathon
Awarded a grant for a DAO-based project management tool. Also built CURE Data DAO at ETH Global — a decentralized platform aggregating encrypted hospital data on Filecoin, with on-chain access control via Medusa smart contracts.
Winner — Garage Fest Internal Hackathon
+12% pick rate · ~£6M/yearTesco
Recognized for redesigning retail picking-operations incentives. The resulting BRAG Bar lifted average pick rate 12% across 3,000+ stores, worth ~£6M a year.
Winner — Internal Research Paper Competition
Tesco
"Efficient Retail Supply Chains Using Blockchain."
Thesis Distinction
91% accuracy · 10/10IIT Guwahati
One of a select group of B.Tech theses out of 600 final-year students — facial recognition in video, achieving 91% accuracy and a perfect 10/10 grade.
Ideas & opportunities
What I'm spending thinking time on right now. None of these are products — each one says what stage it's at and what would have to happen next.
Project Rosie, as a company
The hackathon pipeline works. The open question is whether it becomes a treatment rather than a demo: clinical-trial and compassionate-use partners, an order-of-magnitude cut to the ~$200–300K personalized dose, and distributed logistics for a molecule on a tumor's clock.
Looking for a technical co-founder and clinical partners.
Achilles — knee MRI abnormality detection
RSNA AI Challenge on Kaggle: detect 12 clinically important knee MRI abnormalities from studies paired with their original radiology reports. Image plus text, scored on macro-AUC.
Submission deadline 22 Oct 2026.
Heimdall — urban drone detection
A distributed acoustic and passive-RF mesh for detecting micro and mini UAS in cities, built to integrate into a broader C2 system. Written up as a PRFAQ, a product spec, and a system architecture — no hardware built.
Canadian IDEaS CUAS 2027 application closes 1 Dec 2026; demo in Ottawa, July 2027.
Project Avalon — sovereign fiber winding
Fiber-optic guided drones are the jam-proof answer to RF-jammed FPV, but rewinding raw telecom glass into high-speed center-payout aerial canisters is an outsourced chokepoint the West doesn't own. The thesis is re-shoring that one step in Ontario.
A one-page thesis. No facility, no LOI, no R&D validation yet.
SALAMANDER — wildfire intelligence
Wildfire detection, intelligence, and response planning software. Drone swarm deliberately cut from the MVP — the interesting problem is the planning layer, not the aircraft.
Docs only. Not a commitment, and competing with better-validated lanes.
Build Your AI Portfolio
A course on shipping AI products, taught from 10+ real projects including the ones that died. The actual lesson is distribution — that's where most AI side projects end, not the model.
Unvalidated. Needs demand evidence before a single lesson gets written.
Shipped work lives in the portfolio. If any of these overlap what you're working on, I'd like to hear from you.
Open source & code
Recent public work. Full profile and history on GitHub.
github.com/shashank-padalaLoading repositories…
To connect with me
Reach out on LinkedIn — I respond to thoughtful messages about AI research, startups, partnerships, and advisory.
linkedin.com/in/shashank-padalaOr book time
Schedule a 30 min call