Kaarel Kaarelson

Kaarel Kaarelson

I live in San Francisco and grew up in Eastern Europe. I studied at Dartmouth and work as an early employee at a consumer AI startup. Lately, I've been interested in automating end-to-end software tasks with coding agents and how to engineer luck. I use this site to keep track of my work and the books I'm reading.

Projects

  • Consumer AI venture - Founding ML engineer to zero-shot the matching problem. Backed by $10 mil from Tier-1 VC.
  • Cursor for Sheets - Finalist in Google Gemini hackathon. Built things in 6h that Google hasn't shipped in 3 years.
  • OpenAI Cybersecurity Grant recipient - stopped...
  • Y Combinator AI Startup School 2025 - I asked Fei-Fei Li a question and, surprisingly, it got 190k views on youtube.
  • #1 hire at a Bay Area AI lab backed by Tier-1 VC - joined mid-college while doing proofs in advanced math classes.
  • 1st Place at Europe's Biggest Defence Tech Hackathon - Trained CNN for drone detection on neuromorphic event cameras. Turned down a tech unicorn founder's offer to start a company in Ukraine and moved to Silicon Valley instead.
  • Nuclear robotics research with UT Austin - Deployed software infrastructure on Boston Dynamics quadruped robots to automate physical labor in hazardous environments.
  • 3D CAD AI Agent - Top 2 in Entrepreneur First hackathon. Made gpt-4 generate 3d engineering designs, before it was cool.