Ashish Vaswani

Ashish Vaswani is a computer scientist best known as the first-listed author of the 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need”, which introduced the Transformer architecture that now underpins virtually every large language model — GPT, Claude, Gemini and Llama among them. He earned a PhD at the University of Southern California and conducted the Transformer work as a researcher at Google Brain. The Transformer paper has since become one of the most cited works in modern computer science.

In 2021 Vaswani co-founded the AI-agents startup Adept with fellow Transformer co-author Niki Parmar; the pair left in 2022 and went on to found Essential AI, where Vaswani is co-founder and CEO. The company builds research-led foundation models and emerged from stealth in 2023 with a Series A backed by March Capital, Google, Nvidia and AMD.

As a foundational figure in modern AI, Vaswani is a sought-after angel in frontier-AI companies. Dealroom tracks his investments in Perplexity — whose 2022 seed round drew capital from across the AI research community — and the computer-vision data platform V7. His public angel footprint is otherwise lightly documented, with his primary focus remaining Essential AI.