Useful Sensors was founded in March 2022 by CEO Pete Warden and CTO Manjunath Kudlur, with Ali Zartash, Nat Jeffries, James Wang, and Niranjan Yadla as the founding engineers.

Pete and Manjunath were both founding members of Google’s TensorFlow open source machine learning framework, and part of Google’s Brain research group.

Pete’s previous startup, Jetpac, was acquired by Google in 2014 for its technology. He went on to lead the on-device machine learning infrastructure team at Google for seven years, and created TensorFlow Lite Micro, the leading ML framework for embedded systems. Together with Evgeni Gousev he coined the term TinyML, created the TinyML conference, wrote the standard embedded embedded ML textbook, and taught graduate-level courses at Stanford and Harvard. He’s now also pursuing a Computer Science PhD at Stanford on the topic of ML Sensors, the foundation of Useful Sensors’ work.

Manjunath has a PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Most recently, he set up the compiler team at Cerebras that created foundational software for the Cerebras software stack. Previously, he developed significant portions of the CUDA compiler, and has worked on GPU computing even before the days of ML explosion.