About

Dr. Saurav Agarwal is an entrepreneur, internationally-recognized robotics expert, author, and startup adviser.

Saurav is currently the Founder and CTO of SIERA.AI and was the founding CEO of the company from 2017-2022. He started SIERA.AI in 2017 right out of his Ph.D. with a vision to transform productivity and safety for industrial workers. Since then, he has raised more than $6M of venture capital, built a team of 30+ people across 2 continents, launched 2 unique Robotics and AI product lines, built a go-to-market program, and onboarded over 60 enterprise customers, several of them in the Fortune 500.

Prior to starting SIERA.AI, he received a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Texas A&M University in 2017. His Ph.D. research was within the field of autonomous robots (ground vehicles and drones), intelligent mobility, software algorithms, and computer vision. As part of his Ph.D. research, he was awarded the Padovani Fellowship by Qualcomm Inc. in 2015 for his contributions to developing the world’s first commercially available vision-enabled self-flying drone.

Let’s connect on LinkedIn!

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I get advice from Saurav?

Let’s have a quick call to figure out if I can help you (DM me on LinkedIn to set up a call). If you feel that I can offer you value, I’ll point you to my paid coaching program where you can engage with me on a pay-as-you-go hourly basis or on a fixed schedule.

What topics does Saurav advise on?

Starting a new tech company

Starting a business as an immigrant

Angel capital fundraising

Venture capital fundraising

Product Strategy (Idea, Prototype, MVP, Launch, Initial Traction)

Career Coaching

Job Interview Coaching (I’ve interviewed over 200 executives, engineers, and managers for every business function from sales and marketing to software development)

Go To Market Strategy Planning and Execution

How do I get a job at SIERA.AI?

SIERA.AI is hiring heavily in software development roles both full-time and internships. Please head on over to the careers page here. SIERA.AI is very interested in people who have solid Web MERN Stack/Computer Vision/Embedded Software/AWS/ML/AI experience. Please do not contact Saurav directly for job openings as it will take a long time for him to get back to you. Applying through the website is the fastest way as that puts you into the applicant tracking system which speeds things up.

News

• October 2020: Siera raised a $4.5M Series A from Parkway Venture Capital.
• January 2019: I discovered some spammers had inserted pharma links into my blog by exploiting a weak WordPress plugin. Blog2social plugin was the culprit. This should be fixed now.
• November 2018: Stocked Robotics organized a major showcase for investors and enterprise customers. The response was completely mind-blowing with one company’s reps flying down in the CEO’s private jet to see our tech in action! I was truly humbled by the response we got.
• July 2018: My company Stocked Robotics is hiring for multiple positions (full-time/contract/internships), check out our open positions here. Feel free to apply directly from our website or head on over to Angellist.
• January, 2018: I am now Co-Founder and CTO @ Stocked Robotics. We’re building the next generation of autonomy for industrial machines, come join us if you wanna build cool bots and change the world!
• December, 2017: Defended my Ph.D.!
• September 5, 2017: I have released slam_karto_sesync, a package for pose-graph SLAM in ROS which uses open_karto as the front-end and SE-SYNC for backend.
• September 5, 2017: I have released slam_karto_gtsam, a package for pose-graph SLAM in ROS which uses open_karto as the front-end and gtsam for backend.
• August 14, 2017: I have released slam_karto_g2o a package for pose-graph SLAM in ROS which uses open_karto as the front-end and g2o for backend.
• June 6, 2017: Me and my PhD adviser recently completed the NSF I-Corps program in May 2017 which gave us a $50,000 grant for customer discovery. We are now on track to commercialize our autonomous robotics research!
• June 3, 2017: I presented the RFM-SLAM paper at ICRA 2017 in Singapore to some great reception.
• May 17, 2017: Our work on long-term autonomous navigation won the National Innovation Award at TechConnect World 2017, Washington, DC!
• December 2016: I presented my work on active data association and global localization at WAFR 2016, San Francisco.
• January 2016: Our work at Qualcomm on autonomous vision-based flight was demoed at CES 2016, here’s a video.
• May 2015: I have joined Qualcomm Research Center in San Diego as a robotics intern working on vision-based autonomy for micro aerial vehicles. My work focuses on fusing real-time motion planning with localization and mapping. Here’s a demo video from CES.
• June 2014: I presented our experimental ICRA2014-pdf on FIRM at ICRA 2014.
• January 2013: I joined EDP Lab @ Texas A&M University.