Ishiki Labs is a San Francisco-based startup founded in 2025 by Amit Yadav (CEO) and Robert Xu (CTO) as part of Y Combinator W26. The company is developing "Fern," a multimodal AI designed to understand context over time, listen and watch continuously, and act with human-like judgment to proactively guide users and handle background tasks to enhance team productivity. Amit previously worked as a Research Scientist at Meta AI, training multimodal LLMs with the LLaMA team and developing video assistants for smart glasses in Reality Labs. He holds a PhD from Purdue University focusing on speech and video processing. Robert also has multimodal AI experience from Meta and research infrastructure work at Citadel Securities. The founders conceived Ishiki Labs to address limitations in existing multimodal AI regarding continuous presence and contextual awareness.
Y Combinator
