Prasad Akella

Dr. Prasad Akella is an engineer, executive, and entrepreneur who has created billion-dollar markets by pioneering and commercializing deep tech products across robotics, enterprise software, and AI. His core belief: technology should empower people, not replace them.

As an engineer at General Motors, he pioneered collaborative robots (“cobots“). As co-founder and VP at Spoke, he helped create business social networks. And, as founder and CEO of Drishti, he pioneered AI-powered video analytics and video language models (VLMs) to build the first vision-language-action models (VLAs) and applied them to manufacturing—which Apple acquired and has deployed across its product lines.

Prasad has worked at, led, and advised companies ranging from Fortune 1 to startups, including GM, SAP, Thomson Reuters. He currently serves as an advisor to deep tech companies in robotics, computer vision, and AI and is an operating partner at ReX Capital. He previously served on the boards of Optessa (acquired by Eyelit/Banneker) and Drishti (acquired by Apple) and as an advisor to Invest India, Govt. of India and Beehive.

Dr. Akella’s work has been recognized with a number of awards including the World Economic Forum (Technology Pioneer), IEEE/International Federation of Robotics’ (Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Robotics and Automation (IERA) Award), National Association of Manufacturers’ (Manufacturing Leadership Award), CBInsights (AI100 list), Forbes (AI50 list), General Motors (“Boss” Kettering Award), ASME (Best Paper Award), IEEE (Anton Philips Award), National Science Foundation (NSF/STA Fellow; 3 grants), and IIT (HAL Award). He holds 15 US patents in social networks, brand fraud detection, AI/computer vision/video, and manufacturing.

Prasad is a Fellow of the ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) and of the SME (Society of Manufacturing Engineers). He holds a PhD in Robotics from Stanford University (Edgar Meakin Fellow), an MBA from the University of Michigan’s Ross Business School (High Distinction, Beta Gamma Sigma), and a BS from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (HAL Award).

News

Prasad's work has been featured in...