About.

I hate following most social norms. I suck at doing things the conventional way. And no, that does not mean I will show up to work wearing my underwear over my pants.

I'm 19. I build and research full-time.

My roots lie in a small coastal village in South India.

My family farmed for generations. We grew chilli, tobacco, and other food crops. I grew up with all of it. The land, the crops, the people, the chemicals, the machines, and even the money problems in a traditional Indian family dynamic.

I now study engineering at the University of Washington, though I don't really believe in formal education.

Academically, I was far from exceptional. I never cared enough to study for grades. My dad once dropped a course and retook it the next semester because he got a 97 instead of a 100. That was why we couldn't ever have a peaceful relationship while I was growing up. He was a perfectionist. I believed imperfections were sometimes what made things perfect.

I fell in love with the art of "fuck around and find out".

I cared about completely different things. I would break open my ceiling fan to see if I could make it spin in reverse. I would try building my own hydroponic irrigation system. I would change how my coffee machine brewed coffee. I would try Pavloving different animals into doing chores for me. Yes, my dog is more capable than a $20,000 Unitree G1 at doing laundry.

I picked up beatboxing, then dance, street plays, drama, debate, and pageants. I performed in front of tens of thousands of people. I led blood, book, and clothing donation drives. I led a thousand students as school captain.

I loved it. I loved being on stage. I loved people. I loved making people laugh. I loved being the chaos and also being the person who could hold it together.

I started doing things that made me happy.

and somewhere along the way, I fell in love with problems.

I love being a founder because it means

Freedom

Freedom to not have my entire life decided for me or imposed upon me because of societal norms.
Freedom to become obsessed with something nobody around me understands yet.
Freedom to build something because I think it should exist.
Freedom to change direction when I realise I was wrong.
Freedom to work with people I actually respect.
Freedom to fail on my own terms.
Freedom to change lives.
Freedom to be me.

So I started building.

I have built high-voltage power electronics and sold plasma reactors.

I built hull-integrity sensing hardware for a U.S. Navy project and deployed subsea instrumentation in the Pacific.

I built computer-vision and event-logging pipelines during work with WHOI, NSF's OOI, and UW APL.

I surveyed the Axial Seamount, the most active underwater volcano in the Pacific Northwest, 300 miles off the coast of Oregon, using an 11,000-pound robot.

At OpenTrade, I built the model-evaluation and ranking stack for a product that reached 0 to 150,000 users in two months.

I collaborated on MTEB. The package reached roughly 17 million PyPI downloads by August 2026.

I built a knee-MRI research pipeline around a Radiological Society of North America challenge dataset.

I fabricated and characterised dye-sensitised solar-cell architectures with the group behind the world-record efficiency.

I published 3 peer-reviewed papers, 2 technical reports, and presented at an international conference.

I'm also intrigued by psychedelics, ego death, consciousness, religion, God, ambition, love, and what it means to be human.

Spirituality often confuses me.

Curiosity is the only thing tying this page together.

I'm getting at something here. I promise.

- Tejas Naladala