Neil Tripathi

I'm the co-founder of Cybernetic Labs (full-time since March 2026), where I build the evaluation and simulation infrastructure for embodied AI: RoboEval, a VLM-as-Judge evaluation system for robot manipulation policies; PackingBench, a simulation benchmark for warehouse packing; SmolVLA deployment and sim-to-real transfer on the SO-101 arm; and mechanistic interpretability to probe what VLA policies actually learn.

Outside the company, my research sits at the intersection of computational neuroscience and robotics — building locomotion controllers from real connectome wiring diagrams (a 13K-neuron Drosophila VNC in MuJoCo, deployed to a physical hexapod) and testing whether biological circuits fail more interpretably than learned policies. I have a radiotherapy-robustness paper at SERA 2026 (with Prof. Birjoo Vaishnav at the University of Maryland and Prof. Weixian Liao at Towson) and a VLM visibility benchmark with Prof. Ernest Davis at NYU. I graduated from NYU with a B.A. in Computer Science and a Minor in Mathematics (Dean's List 2023-2025); previously I co-founded Physical.AI (top 6, YC W25 hackathon).