Sam Bhattacharyya

Working on something new

Working on my 2nd startup Katana. I previously led the AI team at Hopin. Formerly CEO/co-founder of Vectorly (acquired by Hopin). US Patent Holder, Fluent in Mandarin and Spanish

Work Experience

Katana

Remote
CEO / Founder
2024 - Present

Working on something new.

Hopin Acquired

Remote
Head of AI
2021 - 2024

I led the AI team at Hopin, building features like AI Upscaling, Touch Up and AI Clips in Streamyard, Hopin's livestreaming product. I did both product (talking to customers, strategy, project management) and engineering (training AI models, prototyping features). Left when the founders left, when Hopin was acquired by a Private Equity firm in 2024.

Vectorly Acquired

San Francisco
CEO / Co-Founder
2018 - 2021

We developed and patented a novel video-compression technology called "Video Vectorization" which could compress animated & e-learning video by 10x (compared to h264) while improving video quality. We found it difficult to commercialize our new video codec and pivoted to AI Media Processing (e.g. AI Upscaling, Noise Filtering) in 2020.

Our AI Media Processing SDK was 10x more efficient than anything else available at the time, and was used in production by a number of billion-dollar companies, including Hopin, Fuze, Airmeet and Hubilo. In late 2021, we sold Vectorly to Hopin, our largest customer.

dot Learn Acquired

Lagos, Nigeria
CEO / Co-Founder
2016 - 2018

After graduating MIT, I started dot Learn as a social-impact venture, building an e-learning app with affordable, data-light video-learning courses which helped 50k+ students in West Africa study for their college entrance exams.

After failing to monetize, we rebranded the company to "Vectorly" in 2018 and focused on commercializing a proprietary video-compression algorithm "Video Vectorization" we had built internally.

Education

Masters in Business Administration

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2014 - 2016
Entrepreneurship Specialization, Legatum Fellow (2014-2015) and MIT Delta V (2016). Electives focused on startups and venture, with most free time spent working on dot Learn.

MSc Mechanical Engineering

Vanderbilt University
2010 - 2012
MS Portion of MS/PhD program in Robotics. My master's thesis focused on AI algorithms for surgical robots to navigate autonomously in the human body using force sensors.

BSc in Mechanical Engineering

Columbia University
2006 - 2010
Spent 3 semesters of research focused on Robotics & AI at the Robotics Lab

Projects

Katana

Tool that auto-edits video podcasts. Trained custom multi-modal LLM on 1000 podcasts for the most common edits (filler words, out takes, clips). Special focus on Zoom recordings

WebCodecsFundamentals

Digital textbook on WebCodecs, referenced by MDN, Chrome Developer Blog and CanIUse. Includes codec support table indicating WebCodecs support for 1087 codec variations across 1M+ real devices.

Free AI Video Upscaler

A free tool to upscale videos in the browser, which unexpectedly achieved product market fit, growing to 250,000 monthly active users without marketing

WebSR

An open source library for running real-time AI Upscaling networks on video in the browser

Background Segmentation SDK

SDK for running real-time background segmentation in the browser. Closed source / acquired by Hopin.

Video Vectorization

Video Compression technology that we patented and then open sourced

dot Learn

E-learning app to help West African students pass college entrance exams

Get in Touch

I'm currently busy with my startup.

If you're building with video on the web, checkout WebCodecsFundamentals

If you need to upscale a video, check out Free AI Video Upscaler

If you're thinking of doing a podcast, checkout Katana.

If it's about anything else, drop me a line at hi@sambhattacharyya.com