About
Scientist by training, founder by choice
I'm Dr. Mohit Vaishnav, Co-founder and CEO of Kimova AI in Tallinn, where we build an agentic AI co-auditor for ISO, SOC 2 and privacy audits.
Alongside the company, I'm a postdoctoral researcher in TalTech's Applied Artificial Intelligence Group, asking whether vision-language models really reason or only pattern-match. Recent work appeared in TMLR (J2C at NeurIPS 2026) and at CoNLL 2026, with an oral presentation at ACL 2026.
My PhD at Brown University's Serre Lab and ANITI, awarded by Université Toulouse III, studied how attention and memory drive reasoning in brains and machines, with papers at NeurIPS, ICLR and Neural Computation. Before that came an Erasmus Mundus master's across the UK, France and Spain, and an engineering degree in India, where I published my first papers at the IEEE Data Compression Conference as an undergraduate. I've also held applied AI roles at Sandvik, DFKI and WeDiagnostiX.
- Now
- Co-founder & CEO, Kimova AI · Postdoc, TalTech
- Based in
- Tallinn, Estonia
- PhD
- Brown University / ANITI · Université Toulouse III, 2023
- Research
- Vision-language models, visual reasoning, attention & memory
- Building
- Agentic AI co-auditor for ISO, SOC 2 & privacy audits
- Worked across
- 10+ countries in Asia, Europe and the US
Recognition
Awards & honors
Tehnopol AI Accelerator — Kimova AI selected
Tehnopol Science and Business Park, Tallinn
Kimova AI was selected for the next cohort of Tehnopol’s six-month AI Accelerator, one of eight companies chosen per round, under the AI Development Programme created with Estonia’s Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications.
Google Cloud Startup Program
Google Cloud
Selected for Kimova AI — enterprise-grade infrastructure, technical support and strategic guidance to scale AI-driven cybersecurity.
Top 5 Global — Kaggle Half-Earth Challenge
Kaggle
Top-5 of 3000+ participants (99.9th percentile) in advanced plant-species identification using state-of-the-art computer vision.
Arctic Code Vault Contributor
GitHub & Long Now Foundation
Open-source contributions preserved in GitHub’s Arctic Code Vault, a 1,000-year archive of public software.
ANR Doctoral Fellowship
ANITI — French National Research Agency
Prestigious doctoral fellowship from one of France’s four flagship AI institutes.
Charpak Excellence Scholarship
Government of France
Scholarship for outstanding international students, named after Nobel laureate Georges Charpak.
KVPY National Fellowship
Dept. of Science & Technology, India
National fellowship recognizing exceptional promise in engineering and scientific research.
How I work
What carries over from lab to company
Evidence before claims
My research asks whether a model really reasoned or only matched a pattern. The same standard applies to an AI audit: every finding should trace back to evidence.
From paper to product
Ideas earn their place by working in the real world — benchmarks and diagnostics in the lab, then systems customers rely on at Kimova.
Built across borders
Studying and working across India, Europe and the US taught me to build with diverse teams, for customers in any market.
Short bio · free to reuse
Dr. Mohit Vaishnav is the Co-founder & CEO of Kimova AI, a Tallinn-based company building an agentic AI co-auditor for ISO, SOC 2 and privacy audits, and a postdoctoral researcher in the Applied Artificial Intelligence Group at Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech). He earned his PhD in computer science (cognitive AI and visual reasoning) from Université Toulouse III, with research conducted at Brown University's Serre Lab and ANITI under Thomas Serre and Nicholas Asher. His work on visual reasoning, attention and vision-language models has been published at NeurIPS, ICLR, TMLR and CoNLL and in Neural Computation.