PA

Pieter Abbeel

Investment Partner at AIX Ventures

Berkeley, California

Overview 

Pieter Abbeel is the Co-Founder of Covariant and Gradescope, an Investment Partner at AIX Ventures, and a Professor at UC Berkeley. His career highlights include co-founding successful tech companies Covariant and Gradescope, as well as being a prominent figure in the field of artificial intelligence and robotics with a strong background in academia and industry.

Work Experience 

  • Co-Founder, President, Chief Scientist

    2017 - Current

    Drawing on recent advances in Deep Imitation Learning and Deep Reinforcement Learning, Embodied Intelligence is developing AI software that makes it easy to teach robots new, complex skills.

Covariant is an AI Robotics company developing a universal AI that enables robots to see, reason, and act on the world around them.

Raised $222,000,000.00 from CPP Investments, Radical Ventures, AIX Ventures, Northgate Capital, Gates Frontier Fund, Index Ventures, Amplify Partners, CPP Investments, Amplify Partners and Radical Ventures.

  • Professor

    2008

    Research and teaching in artificial intelligence and robotics. Lately, that largely means in deep learning, reinforcement learning, unsupervised learning, self-supervised learning, meta-learning. Some things we invented in our research: TRPO, MAML, InfoGAN, SAC, GAE, MA-DDPG, Domain Randomization, Hindsight Experience Replay... Some classes I teach: - Deep Unsupervised Learning: https://sites.google.com/view/berkeley-cs294-158-sp20/home - Intro to AI: https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs188/fa18/staff.html - The Business of AI: https://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/zskatona/ewmba267-11-s21.html

  • Investment Partner

    2021

    Try my best to help AI start-ups

  • Podcast Host

    2021

    In each episode of The Robot Brains podcast (coming soon), renowned artificial intelligence researcher, professor and entrepreneur Pieter Abbeel meets the brilliant minds attempting to build robots with brains. Pieter is joined by leading experts in AI Robotics from all over the world as he explores how far humanity has come in its mission to create conscious computers, mindful machines and rational robots. https://open.spotify.com/show/2qbLq3HrhTnnmmsHc37QOD

  • Co-Founder

    2014 - 2018

    Gradescope was acquired by TurnItIn in Fall 2018! Gradescope is a web-app that streamlines grading, with instructors reporting it allows them to grade 2x faster while also improving accuracy, consistency and transparency, and without compromising on assessment format. It's free, you should try it out if you 'd like to spend less time on grading without compromising on quality!

Gradescope enables instructors to grade paper-based assignments online.

Raised $5,474,700.00 from Reach Capital, Ironfire Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, Freestyle Capital, GSV Ventures and K9 Ventures.

  • Research Scientist

    2016 - 2017

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company that develops advanced AI models, including ChatGPT.

Raised $21,900,120,000.00 from Citi, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, HSBC and Santander.

  • Ph.D. student

    2002 - 2008

  • Undergrad Electrical Engineering

    1995 - 2000

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