About
From cognitive science to shipping AI products
I'm Dr. Mohit Vaishnav, Co-founder and CEO of Kimova AI. We're reimagining cybersecurity compliance — our platform automates complex ISO 27001 audit processes, cutting audit time dramatically while holding enterprise-grade standards.
Before founding Kimova, I spent years at the frontier of AI research. My PhD at Brown University and ANITI (one of France's flagship AI institutes) explored how attention and memory drive reasoning in both brains and machines — published at NeurIPS, ICLR and Neural Computation. I've since carried that into applied roles at TalTech, Sandvik and the German Research Center for AI (DFKI).
That dual lens — rigorous science plus a builder's bias for shipping — is how I approach everything. I've worked across 10+ countries, ranked top-5 of 3000+ in a global Kaggle AI challenge, and I care most about AI that earns real-world trust.
In brief
Dr. Mohit Vaishnav is the Co-founder & CEO of Kimova AI, a Tallinn-based company that automates ISO 27001 cybersecurity audits with AI, 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 and in Neural Computation.
How I work
Leadership philosophy
Innovation-driven
Building AI that solves real problems — bridging frontier research and practical business value.
Human-centered AI
Systems that augment human capability rather than replace it, so technology serves people first.
Global impact
Scalable solutions that cross borders, making advanced AI accessible to organizations everywhere.
Recognition
Awards & honors
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.
Google Cloud Startup Program
Google Cloud
Selected for Kimova AI — enterprise-grade infrastructure, technical support and strategic guidance to scale AI-driven cybersecurity.
Arctic Code Vault Contributor
GitHub & Long Now Foundation
Selected contributor to GitHub’s 1,000-year preservation of critical open-source 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.