Vinay Prabhu is Co-Founder of HAL51.AI, a Menlo Park startup building affordable AI-powered 3D display hardware, and is now Co-Founder and CTO of Venomics AI.

Vinay earned a dual PhD from Carnegie Mellon University after research at IIT Madras on wireless communication algorithms. He was the first employee and Chief Scientist at UnifyID AI Labs, where he pioneered planetary scale human kinematics modeling from motion sensor data.

Vinay describes himself as a scientist-tinkerer who likes to make science fiction come true, with over 30 peer reviewed publications and a Google Scholar citation count above 5,500. He created the Kannada-MNIST dataset and is a regular Burning Man participant.

At HAL51.AI, co-founded with Sanghyun Han, he invented the LemurBox, a frugal-science XR device that turns a smartphone into a 3D holographic assistant. The company was a TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 Startup Battlefield participant.

UnifyID exited in 2021 through its acquisition by Prove. In 2026 he co-founded Venomics AI, which raised a $2.7M pre-seed round to build an AI-powered venom drug discovery platform.