Ashish Gupta

Computer scientist, founder, and engineering leader.

I like building intelligent systems for hard problems. My career has sat where algorithms, data, and real decisions meet: building hedging and risk systems for equity options on Wall Street, leading machine learning for Google's ad auctions across billions of clicks, and co-founding companies in data and healthcare.

Today I'm co-founder and Head of Agentic Engagement at Arbiter, where we're building a care orchestration platform that unites healthcare.

Outside of work, I run a quantitative investing initiative: making the risk thinking I learned on Wall Street accessible to everyday investors.

Career

Arbiter

Co-Founder, Head of Agentic Engagement 2026 – present

A care orchestration platform that unites healthcare.
Agenta Health Acquired by Arbiter

Co-Founder Nov 2024 – Dec 2025

AI agents for healthcare operations: voice, video, and text agents that automate multi-step workflows such as patient scheduling and payer calls. Started inside Kain Capital's healthcare portfolio and acquired by Arbiter in December 2025.
Kain Capital

Chief Technology Officer 2023 – 2025

A healthcare-focused private equity firm that partners with founder-led, mid-sized healthcare companies and transforms them through information technology. Led technology and strategy initiatives across the firm and its portfolio. New York.
Polymer Search

Co-Founder; CEO, then CTO 2019 – 2023

The first no-code tool to make structured data accessible to anyone.
Google

Technical Lead, AdWords Optimization & Machine Learning 2012 – 2018

Led conversion optimization and machine learning for Google Search Ads: models to measure, predict, and optimize auction outcomes, and new metrics for advertiser value, measured and optimized over billions of clicks. Google's white paper Setting Smarter Search Bids (2018) describes my team's work on Smart Bidding (original).
D.E. Shaw & Co.

Quantitative Developer, Options Trading 2008 – 2012

Built electronic trading systems for equity options: portfolio hedging, risk management, trade execution, forecasting, and real-time analytics.
Google

Engineering Intern 2006

AdSense: designed and built a real-time frequency capping system, which limits how often one person sees the same ad. Frequency capping is now a standard Google Ads feature (original).
Intel Labs

Research Intern 2005 and 2006

Pittsburgh (with CMU) and Cambridge, UK: distributed algorithms for modular robotics, and high-performance packet classification. The modular robotics work was part of Claytronics, a CMU and Intel project featured in New Scientist.
IBM Research

Research Intern Summer 2002

Tools for building large-scale distributed e-government applications. New Delhi.

Education & research

Northwestern University

PhD, Computer Science 2002 – 2008

Thesis: Black Box Methods for Inferring Parallel Applications' Properties in Virtual Environments, advised by Prof. Peter Dinda. My paper on sketch-based network monitoring was chosen as one of the cool systems ideas featured in Cool Systems Ideas: Inspirations from Theory, a Princeton graduate seminar taught by Kai Li and devoted entirely to standout systems designs built on theory (original).
IIT Delhi

B.Tech, Computer Science 1998 – 2002

Admitted with an All India Rank of 10 in the IIT entrance exam, among about 130,000 candidates. My senior thesis received the department's Best B.Tech Project Award.

PhD, publications, and patent →

Quantitative investing initiative

A long-running project: making the quantitative thinking I learned at D.E. Shaw, such as volatility, drawdowns, correlation, and allocation, accessible to everyday investors, under QuantCommons.

Things I've built

I've been building since I was twelve, when I wrote, and sold, software for teaching astronomy and physics. Since then: a search engine that blended Google and Yahoo and ended up in BusinessWeek, games with AI opponents that are hard to beat, a 3D renderer, CPU and network simulators, and a trip to the ACM ICPC World Finals. Lately it's quant tools for everyday investors.