Winner. Business Leader of the Year 2022

Ankur Agarwal

Position: Senior Engineering Manager
Company: PlusAI Inc.
City: San Jose, California
Country: USA
Economic/Business Sector: Technology/Software & IT Services

As a Senior Engineering Manager, Perception at Plus (formerly PlusAI), Ankur leads a Research Scientists and Software Engineers team for various Computer Vision and Deep Learning projects. He is a robotics technology leader and a computer vision and deep learning expert with almost a decade of experience in the autonomous robotics space. Over his career, he has worked with various robots, from autonomous quadcopters to warehouse robots and now autonomous Class 8 trucks, that haul more than 40,000 lbs of weight.

Autonomous trucking is an extremely niche domain with few successful companies. Plus falls into a unique group of companies, with autonomous trucks hauling freight, on the road, for shipping companies. Ankur was an early employee at Plus.

Before Plus, Ankur was a Senior Systems and Software Engineer focusing on Computer Vision and Deep Learning for indoor robots. Before that, he worked on autonomous quadcopters and warehouse robots at Qualcomm Research.

He received his Master’s in Electrical Engineering from USC, focusing on Image Processing and Computer Vision. During grad school, he was also a student researcher at USC’s ICT lab, working on computer graphics and digital avatars.

As an early engineer and now a seasoned Engineering Manager, Ankur deeply understands autonomous robots and works on various problems at Plus. He leads a team of engineers and research scientists, working on R&D and execution and productization problems in this deep-tech space. He works with cross-functional teams across different time zones and has contributed across the board in Perception systems, Infrastructure, CI/CD, tooling, product demonstrations, and feature ownership. He has grown through the ranks from software/systems engineering to owning features to leading and managing teams.

Ankur has been involved in several high-stakes customer and OEM partnerships at Plus, defining the product and the drive experience. His work as an independent contributor and team lead has directly resulted in the success of these partnerships.

Ankur Agarwal played a critical leadership role during Plus’s first commercial pilot with Amazon as an independent contributor and team lead for the Lane Keeping module. The project was a massive success, and proceeded to the next production fulfillment goal. This feat brought Plus more industry exposure and OEM interest. After experiencing the technology, Amazon also decided to buy a stake in their company, increasing its valuation and opening up avenues for other partnerships and freight movers.

Ankur’s unique skillset and experience allow him to understand the system as a whole. He is part of the team that solves the highest level of escalations and urgent improvements. More recently, his work has been central to Plus’s successful partnership with IVECO, one of Europe’s largest truck manufacturers.

Since this was the very first commercial offering, Ankur’s work also laid the foundation for Operational Design Domain, feature planning, safety analysis, and testing at Plus.

The successful execution of these projects has helped establish Plus as an industry leader in the autonomous trucking space. Ankur is an important member of the Perception team, and under his guidance, they continue making autonomous trucking technology at Plus a reality.