Andrej Karpathy

Andrej Karpathy is a Slovak-Canadian computer scientist and one of the most recognizable figures in applied deep learning. He completed his PhD at Stanford under Fei-Fei Li, where he designed and taught the influential CS231n course on convolutional neural networks. He was a founding member and research scientist at OpenAI (2015–2017), then served as Senior Director of AI at Tesla (2017–2022), where he led the Autopilot computer-vision team and its data engine for self-driving.

In 2024 Karpathy founded Eureka Labs, an AI-native education startup, and in 2026 he joined Anthropic's pre-training team. He is among the most widely followed educators in AI, through his “Neural Networks: Zero to Hero” series, nanoGPT, and essays that popularised ideas such as “Software 2.0.” That public profile gives his views — and his cheques — outsized influence in the developer community.

Karpathy is a prolific angel investor, reported to have backed well over a dozen AI startups, favouring technically ambitious, AI-first companies. Dealroom tracks his investments in Perplexity and Adept, and he is consistently named among Perplexity's earliest angel backers. The combination of deep technical credibility and a large following makes his participation a sought-after signal on frontier-AI cap tables. Beyond Perplexity, his reported angel portfolio spans AI-cloud and developer-tooling companies such as Lambda.