Nikhil Shankar

Nikhil Shankar is the Co-founder and Chief Engineer at Silurian AI, an artificial intelligence startup based in the United States. Prior to establishing his current venture, he worked as a Software Engineer at Amazon Web Services, specifically focusing on the development of the AWS SageMaker machine learning platform. Before entering the broader commercial technology sector, Shankar pursued a doctoral degree in applied mathematics with a research emphasis on fluid dynamics, though he ultimately left the PhD program to engineer commercial software. At Silurian AI, he currently directs the engineering development of foundation models designed for comprehensive Earth simulations, beginning with advanced global weather forecasting systems. His technical focus centers on applying these predictive artificial intelligence models to complex global challenges, including wildfire tracking and energy grid prediction across the insurance, agriculture, and global logistics sectors.