Vinay Rao

Vinay is an Operating Partner based in San Francisco and is our resident expert in AI Systems, Safety & Trust Infrastructure.

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He holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Engineering from Stanford university and was an early employee at Anthropic, where he served as Head of Safeguards, helping define and implement safety standards for frontier AI systems. With over 20 years of experience at the forefront of technology, Vinay combines deep academic expertise in AI and machine learning with hands-on leadership in deploying high-stakes systems at scale. He began his career building and launching scaled products at Google and Airbnb, grounding his work in both rigorous research and real-world execution.

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Throughout his career, he has led trust and safety at global scale, holding leadership roles at YouTube and Stripe, where he focused on safeguarding complex ecosystems and ensuring platform integrity across millions of users.

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He is currently the CTO of ROOST, a San Francisco–based non-profit dedicated to building and open-sourcing the critical safety infrastructure required for the next generation of AI.

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