Towaki Takikawa

I am a co-founder / CEO of Outerport. Our mission is to build AI that can design, engineer and optimize advanced manufacturing processes and industrial equipment.

We do so through an AI process engineering agent that can read engineering diagrams, generate designs, run simulations, and optimize design parameters.We also build AI foundation models trained on physical equipment data that can optimize processes 100x better than existing methods.

We are proud to be working with some of the world's most important companies in chemicals, semiconductor equipment, materials, EPC, and heavy industries.

Joined NVIDIA full-time as a Research Scientist in the Hyperscale Graphics Systems Group, focusing on fundamental research on simulation technologies. In particular I focused on how to effectively represent the geometry behind physical objects as data. 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.