Nicholas Pilkington
CTO And Founder at DroneDeploy
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolNicholas Pilkington is a seasoned founder and CTO with 13 years of experience building robotics, computer vision, and ML-driven products from concept to global deployment. He founded DroneDeploy, a leading reality-capture platform used across construction, mining, agriculture and energy, and earlier co-founded Luno, one of the first BTC/ZAR exchanges. With a PhD and Master's in Machine Learning from the University of Cambridge and early engineering experience at NVIDIA, he combines deep academic rigor with hands-on systems and kernel-level debugging experience. Based in San Francisco, he also scouts for Sequoia, investing in early-stage ML and vision startups across the U.S. and South Africa, reflecting a rare blend of operator, researcher, and investor perspectives. An active writer on algorithms and problem solving, he brings a pragmatic, research-informed approach to scaling complex robotics and data pipelines.
13 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
PhD Machine Learning, PhD Machine Learning at University of Cambridge
English
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (159)
python10
rover10
deep-learning10
computer-graphics10
3d10
arm10
cpp10
ros10
mesh-processing10
robotics10
autopilot10
mavlink10
rendering10
audio10
visual-odometry10
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
nickponline/snippets
Nov 2012 - Dec 2013
Contributions:2 commits in 1 year
nickponline/dd-nerf-dataset
May 2022 - Sep 2022
NerF computer vision dataset
Contributions:9 commits, 27 pushes, 1 branch in 4 months
computer-vision
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