Kiran is the co-founder and CTO of Loom.ai, a San Francisco startup building advanced machine learning and VFX technology for bringing virtual communications to life. Kiran’s team at Loom.ai creates life-like human face visualizations by automatically converting selfies into expressive 3D avatars. The animatable and expressive faces can be used to power applications in VR, gaming, messaging, e-commerce and virtual classrooms for individuals and businesses around the world.
Prior to starting Loom.ai, Kiran was the head of performance capture R&D team at Lucasfilm for 10 years, where he championed computer vision algorithms for synthesizing photo-realistic CGI characters for feature films and computer games. He won the 2017 Sci-Tech Oscar for architecting ILM’s facial performance capture system that was used to create several iconic movie characters such as the Hulk in Marvel’s Avengers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Orcs in Warcraft, Star Wars Episode VII and Star Wars Rogue One. He received a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2004 and a BE from BITS Pilani in 1998.