SirusAI
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A small lab, on purpose

Eleven people. One star. A long memory.

SirusAI is a small applied-AI lab in Bengaluru. We were founded in 2021 by four researchers who had spent the previous decade watching well-funded AI products fail in the rooms they were sold into. We started SirusAI to build the opposite kind of company.

2021founded

Why we are small.

Sirus is a name we made up from the brightest star, Sirius. We dropped the second 'i' for the same reason we dropped the second meeting of the week: friction we didn't need. The company is named for a star because the reference is the work of a small team that gets seen from a long way away.

We have stayed at eleven people for two years. Every time we have grown, the work has gotten worse. We learned, after the third try, to stop. Hiring is now a function of how many systems are in the field, not how much capital is in the bank. We will be twelve, eventually, when the field record demands it.

We are based in Bengaluru. Our customers are in India, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore. We visit every site in person before signing. The travel is tiring and worth it; a system you have not seen in its room is not a system you understand.

i.Six principles,
written down.

A short list. The list is short on purpose. Long lists are how a company forgets which sentence it actually meant. We re-read these every quarter. Half of them have survived since 2021; one was added after a project we regret.

i.

A small claim, defended, beats a big one repeated.

We will say less than we could. The claims that survive are the ones we can show in the room. Marketing rounds up; we round down on purpose.

ii.

The field is the bench.

A model that wins on a curated dataset and loses in a school corridor is a failure. The corridor is the unit of evaluation. Everything else is rehearsal.

iii.

No vendor lock-in, ever.

We hand off the dataset, the training scripts, and the runbook. The contract gives the IP to the customer. If we have to fight to keep you, we have already failed.

iv.

We visit every room.

No deal is signed without one of our engineers walking the building. The travel is what makes the work serious. A photograph is not a substitute.

v.

If the probe says no, we say no.

Around 30% of the probes we run end with us declining the build. We have never had a customer dispute the call. Saying no is a research output we are paid to provide.

vi.

We publish the work.

Eight peer-reviewed papers in four years. Two open datasets. The papers are not marketing; they are how we keep ourselves honest in front of reviewers we cannot bribe.

ii.The eleven.

Engineers, researchers, two operators, one writer. Most have been here three or more years. The shortest tenure on the team, at the moment, is fourteen months.

K

Kavya Iyer

co-founder · research

Lead author on srs-face-v1 and v2. Previously at IISc and a vision lab in Berlin.

A

Aditya Patel

co-founder · systems

Anti-spoof and quantization. Previously shipped two embedded vision products at scale.

M

Madhuri Saha

co-founder · datasets

Owns the field collection programme. Has personally walked 41 of our deployment sites.

R

Rohan Krishnan

co-founder · engineering

Calibration, deployment, runbooks. Wrote the first version of the hand-off document we still use.

P

Priya Banerjee

research engineer

Embedding stability and JPEG robustness. Two papers, one open dataset.

J

Jian Wang

research engineer

Low-light identification and pose perturbation. Joined from a robotics lab in Singapore.

T

Tomoko Cho

platform engineer

Inference container, SDKs, the API surface. The reason every site looks the same on the inside.

S

Sara Aziz

deployment lead · GCC

Runs deployments in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The site visits the rest of us would dread.

V

Vikram Reddy

deployment lead · IN

Fourteen factory installs and counting. The reason our installs come in under a day.

L

Lila Menon

operations

Contracts, audits, the reason your legal team likes us. Used to negotiate for a regulator.

N

Naseer Q.

writer in residence

Writes the runbooks, the field reports, and almost every page on this site.

iii.Numbers, in plain view.

A snapshot of the company in February 2025. Updated every quarter, never rounded up. The number we are most proud of is the one in the bottom right.

11
people on staff
Stable for 24 months. We grow only when the field demands it.
8
peer-reviewed papers
Across CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, ICML, AISTATS, BMVC.
41
deployments in production
Across schools, factories, utilities, and clinics in 4 countries.
0
customers churned
Across the four years since we shipped our first system. Knock on wood.
As cited in
CVPR ’24
The Hindu
Forbes Asia
YourStory
Nikkei Asia

iv.Open roles.

We hire deliberately, and with weight. Three roles open today; expect the process to take six weeks. We pay against the top quartile of Bengaluru market and we don't pretend the comp is for everyone.

i.
Research engineer · edge inferencequantization, kernel optimisation, CPU-first
Bengaluru · on-site
full-time
Apply
ii.
Deployment engineer · GCC regionfly to sites, install, train, hand off
Dubai · on-site + travel
full-time
Apply
iii.
Field-data annotator-in-chiefbuild the labelling pipeline, lead two contractors
Bengaluru · on-site
full-time
Apply

Eleven of us. One star.

Whether you have a problem to bring us, a paper to discuss, or a CV to send—write. We answer every email by hand. It is one of the costs of staying small. We have not yet wanted to give it up.

Write to us Read the field record