Krishna founded REMUS while a scrappy, entrepreneurial undergrad at MIT – first in a dorm room, then from a basement – in 2008 when the world was in recession. The original foundation of REMUS remains at the forefront: partnering with visionary rebels to build (not bet on) technology businesses rewiring entire industries.

Krishna is a contrarian, hands-on investor — so much so that he stepped in when needed as CEO of Presto Automation (Nasdaq: PRST, YC S10), where he wrote the first check out of MIT and became largest shareholder. With Krishna as CEO, the company 4Xed its share price and 10Xed volume. He was featured on Bloomberg TV, CNBC, the Wall Street Journal, and several other publications as he led the company to increasingly focus on its Enterprise Voice AI business while stabilizing its legacy hardware-as-a-platform unit. He is now Chairman of the Board.

In addition to Presto, he also wrote the first checks into other category-leading companies, including Allurion Technologies (NYSE: ALUR, where he is Co-Chairman alongside the former CEO of Medtronic), Ginger (merged with Headspace in 2021 to form a $3B entity), and the first institutional check into ClassPass (valued at $1B+ and acquired by MindBody in 2021). He is co-founder and Executive Chairman of Humanyze, which spun out of MIT.

Krishna partners with entrepreneurs applying AI to enterprise or transforming healthcare. He is also a board member of Ceres Imaging, Cogito, Cohealo, PetaGene, Placester, Spotta, Vyome Biosciences, and ZeroCater, and he has served as an advisor to ClearMotion.

Krishna has helped many of these companies build powerful foundations (from $0M to $15M+ in revenues) and has regularly added trajectory-changing value to his companies over the course of a decade, much as he has done with REMUS itself. He is always focused on “building to last.”

Prior to REMUS, Krishna spent time at McKinsey & Company and JP Morgan, where he helped several Fortune 100 clients on billion-dollar tech deals. He travels incessantly (30+ countries) and has done business across 5 continents. He has a broad set of intellectual interests: he’s conducted chemistry research at the University of Chicago and the Weizmann Institute in Israel, produced a film on English ancient history used at Cambridge and Oxford, and competed as a finalist at the USA Mathematics Olympiad. He’s a keen sports fan (American football, basketball, tennis, and cricket), admires Napoleon, and finds the arts a great way to relax and stimulate creativity.

Krishna received SB degrees in Materials Science and Engineering and Management Science from MIT. He is a graduate of Phillips Academy Andover. To learn more about Krishna, visit his personal website.

What’s something few people know about you?

I love exploring conflict zones. They are microcosms of intractable, real-world problems with real, suffering human beings trapped within them; without understanding them on the ground, we have no chance of finding solutions. The danger and uncertainty also excite me. I have been in Nepal as the 10-year civil war was ending, in Kashmir in the midst of deadly violence and strikes, in Israel as the evacuation from Gaza was underway. I’ve weaved through Turkish checkpoints in the Kurdish hinterland, employed armed bodyguards with diamond merchants in East Africa, and been taken by separatist battalions amidst the tea plantations of Assam. I’ve grown as an individual through these adventures.

What inspires you?

Authenticity really inspires me. I love people discovering and living who they are, without feeling constrained by people or society around them. The most inspiring creators – of companies, empires, technology, art, anything – are always authentic to themselves. They are decisive because they know what they want and are unabashedly ambitious about pursuing it.

What would you tell an aspiring entrepreneur?

To start a company for the right reasons, to listen to the opinions of the few, and not to care about what the majority think or say. Building a large company will often feel like an entirely solitary journey on an entirely uncertain surface, and you should embrace all of that up front.