Towaki Takikawa

I am a co-founder / CEO of Outerport. Our mission is to help people bring physical products, technologies, and inventions into the world, from the initial concept all the way to manufacturing, with lower risk.

As a first step, we offer a platform to build AI agents, as well as built-in tools to help design engineers and manufacturing operators make better-informed decisions by making sense of the technical documents (datasheets, BOMs, drawings, etc) that sit between a concept and reality.

We don't just want to make work faster. We aspire to make new product cycles faster and lower risk. Our approach is to simulate the end-to-end engineering flow with a probabilistic model that combines engineering knowledge with financial models for the first time, so that the cost of design decisions can be predicted and catastrophic manufacturing and supply chain issues can be caught early in the cycle.

I left NVIDIA since I realized that what I wanted to do in life was help people create new things and wanted to do this in the most direct way possible. To find the most effective way to do this, I first explored by doing consulting and freelance work across animation, creative studios, publishers, construction, etc.

I kept seeing the same problem: the path from concept to product (whether it was merchandise or animation or a building) was full of costly, avoidable surprises. Eventually founded a company, but spent a while building ML infrastructure and document intelligence tools to build foundational technology for our real focus.

Joined NVIDIA full-time as a Research Scientist, officially in the New Experiences Research Group, but collaborating a lot with the Spatial Intelligence Lab. I focused on AI for 3D data, exploring how machines could better understand the geometry behind physical objects. I published over 10 research works with over 4500 citations (in top venues like CVPR, SIGGRAPH).

Concurrently, I also did a PhD at the University of Toronto, but I went on leave to start a company. Supervised by my amazing advisors, Sanja Fidler and Alec Jacobson.

Earned a bachelors from the University of Waterloo with a major in computer science. Took a whole lot of mechatronics courses. Spent my out-of-school hours building autonomous driving vehicles, starting in hardware systems engineering and later led the entire software division.

Did a couple of internships: Tulip Interfaces (which works on software that helps factories run their operations), and NVIDIA doing hardware-software integration for autonomous vehicles. Later did research at NVIDIA and Preferred Networks (in Tokyo!).

Started building robots — first in design, then manufacturing / fabrication, and then was the leader driving around town doing procurement, operating CNC mills, building schedules, and whatever needed to be done.

Born in Oregon, the land of semiconductor manufacturing. Growing up around Japanese technology and culture was a source of pride as an immigrant child. Influenced by biographies of Edison and Metal Gear Solid, learned the good and bad sides of technology. Learned to program and do 3D modeling. Aspired to invent technologies (especially robots) that make the world a better place.