Arpit Agarwal
The best way to reach me is a DM on X.
Problems I'm Working On
At Rainbow Labs Inc., which I started in 2020, when the world was crashing down.
- Amaltash2025 - Problem Limit drawdowns across assets, with positions managed automatically by algorithms and mathematics. Status SEC-registered investment adviser since February 2026, with Alpaca as custodian.
- CodeMany2026 - Problem Cut build and deploy costs: $500+ a month on GitHub Actions, plus outages under agentic workloads. Status Launched October 2026: your spare Mac becomes your deployment engine.
- SLIK2020 - Problem Keep private files and photos readable only by you, safe even from future quantum computers. Status Raised $3.5M in January 2022 from a single tweet; front page of Hacker News.
Problems I Solved
- Selective Blurring · M.S. thesis, UIUC2012 - 2013 Problem I couldn't video-call my mom in India: her 1 Mbps connection froze every call. Impact Cut bandwidth 42.4% and published it openly. Keeping the person sharp and blurring the rest is now standard in Zoom and Google Meet.
- Beepi · Head of Mobile & Data Science2015 - 2017 Problem Buying a car meant days of dealers and paperwork. Impact Built the first mobile app for $100,000 purchases in a tap; featured on the App Store for 6+ months.
- Google · Software Engineer, Messaging2017 - 2018 Problem Make messaging fun and fast. Impact Messaging grew from 50 million users to billions, from Allo and Duo into Android Messages.
- Tales → Lumi Labs · Founder, then Founding Engineer at Lumi Labs2018 - 2020 Problem Take in the news quickly, as video instead of long articles. Impact AI-made video stories, solved to a point; acquired by Marissa Mayer for Lumi Labs.
- Tales.so · Founder2024 - 2025 Problem Hear the ideas in a book I love while I'm on the go. Impact 10,000+ books, hundreds of daily listeners. Paused to focus on technically harder problems.
- ContactsManager.io · Founder2025 Problem Adding social features to an app takes months. Impact Two lines of code; used in products and now built into Amaltash and SLIK.
- Leftovers · Creator2026 Problem Coding agents left dev servers, builds and MCP servers running, filling my Mac's memory and disk. Impact Solved, and in beta: a free, open-source macOS menu-bar app that finds what agents leave behind and cleans it up safely.
Problems I Paused
- Pixet · Founder2013 - 2014 Problem The best photos happen when people laugh, and nobody is holding the camera then. Status Not solved: the technology wasn't there yet. Incubated at MassChallenge.
- ifomo · Founder2016 Problem You only find out about the great thing happening nearby after it's over. Status Shipped on iOS in 2016: live pictures and local stories from events around you. Paused.
University
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign2011 - 2013
M.S. Computer Science, then admitted to the PhD program; left soon after to start Pixet · Siebel Scholar · advised by Prof. Klara Nahrstedt · Teaching Assistant · Facebook intern, summer 2013
BITS Pilani2007 - 2011
Undergraduate · research at the NUS HCI Lab, Cleveland State University and CEERI Pilani
- Driver Drowsiness Detection2010 Won the GE Innovation Award and an order for 5,000 glasses.
- Virtual Air Guitar2010 Play guitar in the air: sensor gloves turn finger movements into music. Silver medal, APOGEE 2010.
- AutoComPaste2011 - 2012 Auto-complete instead of copy-paste, published at ACM AVI 2012.
- Papers2010 - 2011 Two research papers published before finishing undergrad.
Publications
“Only some parts of a video frame are actually important to convey the activity being performed… our techniques can reduce the bandwidth utilization by 42.4%.”
AutoComPaste: Auto-Completing Text as an Alternative to Copy-Paste“AutoComPaste allows users to copy-paste different granularity of text from all opened documents without window switching.”
An Optimal Human Adaptive Algorithm to find Action-Reaction Word-pairs Modelling the Simple and Complex Cells in Visual Cortex Area 1 and 2 (V1, V2) for Form DetectionMore Videos
People Who Inspire Me
- Steve Jobs: building with love and focus
- Elon Musk: innovation, and pushing humanity forward
- Ray Kroc: persistence
- Warren Buffett: his methodology for acquiring businesses
Investing
If I love a product I use, I invest in it. In most cases, not enough.
Bitcoin ’13 · NVIDIA ’17 · AMD ’17 · Tesla ’18 · Apple ’18 · Google ’18 · Waymo ’18 · AdQuick ’21 · Mercury ’22 · Replit ’22 · Anthropic ’24 · OpenAI ’24 · SpaceX ’24 · SambaNova ’25 · Apptronik ’25 · Shield AI ’26 · Starcloud ’26 · Atoms ’26