Game Over

Prithvi Prabhu

Hello!

I work at the intersection of technology and design to explore and invent new ways of making computing fast, fun, and easy.

I’m based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Interests

Current

Past

Startups

I’ve founded or been an early engineer in three startups.

Current

I’m currently Chief of Tech at H2O.ai (previously named 0xdata), at Mountain View.

I code every day (19K+ commits in Github), engage with customers on critical features, and develop future products that require sustained, intentional effort. I’ve been a part of almost every major product launched by H2O.ai since 2014.

I’ve been fortunate to collaborate on systems with supercomputing genius Arno Candel, Leland Wilkinson of Grammar of Graphics fame (pic), and hacker extraordinaire Cliff Click.

Previous

In 2010, I founded Plot.io, a web-based interactive visual analytics system based on the Grammar of Graphics.

In 2012, I was in acquisition talks with Tableau Software, but instead decided to join hands with Platfora (a16z, In-Q-Tel). Platfora was acquired by Workday in 2016. The product lives on as Prism.

As far as I’m aware, Plot.io was the first completely browser-based SaaS Business Intelligence (BI) system in existence that worked without third-party plugins like Adobe SVG. You can see it in action here.

Work

Current

H2O Autopilot 2025
AI-assisted no-code workflow/automation platform. Like Apple Shortcuts, but with an AI assistant to create and edit workflows, while still allowing manual editing. Two-way sync between code and block-based visual programming. Dynamically generated custom blocks for connectivity to external services and APIs, both inside and outside the network, for providing connectivity on the fly.
Go / Typescript
H2O Contracts AI 2024
AI agents for analysis and comparison of legal contracts, with document viewer, side-by-side correlation view, minimap and highlighting written from scratch. Air-gapped OCR with page segmentation, reading order detection, and text extraction tuned for legal documents.
Product
Python / Typescript

Past

H2O GPTe 2022
H2O.ai’s flagship generative AI platform. I built the initial version of the product solo – front-end, backend, storage, search, chat – and got it working end-to-end.
Product
Go / Python / Typescript / Postgres / SQLite / HNSWLib / OCR / Canvas
H2O Nitro 2021
A super simple way to build apps in Python, without using HTML, CSS or Javascript. Designed for building interactive data apps, dashboards and front-ends. Integrates with Starlette, FastAPI, Tornado, and Flask. Open source.
Docs / Product / Github / Articles
Python / Typescript / Pyodide
H2O Wave 2020
Realtime dashboards and web apps for Python and R. No HTML, CSS or Javascript required. Open source.
Docs / Github
Go / Python / Typescript / Sqlite
H2O Q 2019
Analytical decision-support platform, with search-driven exploratory data analysis and visualization, data prep and application runtime. Evolved into H2O AI Cloud.
Launch at H2O World 2019 / Product
Go / Python / Typescript / Clickhouse
H2O Hotspot 2018
A system for building immersive, animated graphical interfaces and FUIs by exporting designs directly from Figma/Sketch and compositing them into SVG-based web UIs.
YouTube
Typescript / SVG / Figma / Sketch
H2O Driverless AI 2017
H2O.ai’s flagship automatic machine learning platform. Famous/notorious for its sci-fi user interface.
YouTube / Product
Python / Typescript
H2O Driverless AI for Excel 2017
A native add-in for performing what-if style predictive analytics in Microsoft Excel. Added a suite of predictive array-formulae for spreadsheet data.
C# / .NET
H2O Echo 2016
A real-time dashboard / monitoring system for ML training, based on tuple spaces. Send ad-hoc progress ticks and metrics from a cluster of machines running ML training processes, and broadcast them live to multiple researchers/scientists. Single binary executable, zero configuration setup. Folded into H2O Wave.
Go / Typescript
H2O Steam 2015
A platform for cluster management, experiment hosting/execution, and model management, deployment, and hosting.
Docs
Go / Typescript / Postgres
H2O Flux 2015
A rapid application development system. Folded into H2O Wave.
Typescript
H2O.js 2015
A Javascript-to-Rapids transpiler for executing a subset of Javascript on H2O for machine learning at scale.
Github
Javascript
H2O Play 2015
On-demand H2O cloud provisioning and management on AWS. Evolved into Steam.
Node.js
H2O Flow 2014
A hybrid GUI + REPL environment for exploratory data analysis and machine learning.
YouTube / Launch Announcement / O’Reilly Book / Blog / Github
Coffeescript
H2O Lightning 2014
Statistical graphics library for browsers.
Github
Coffeescript / Canvas
H2O 2014
Distributed in-memory machine learning platform for big data.
Github
Java
Platfora 2012
Plot.io was acquired by Platfora. Post-acquisition, integrated Plot.io as the analytical front-end for Platfora’s big data platform. Ported graphics routines to HTML Canvas.
Wikipedia / YouTube / Demo
Plot.io 2010
SaaS interactive visual analytics system based on Leland Wilkinson’s Grammar of Graphics. You can see it in action here. The front-end was originally authored in a custom Lisp dialect, transpiled to Coffeescript, then Javascript. The programming paradigm was inspired by Flapjax, based on functional reactive programming and flow-based programming, long before Elm or React/Redux were a thing. The entire user interface and visualization/rendering library minified down to ~150KB, a fourth of the size of the average web page back in 2010.
Early career 2000-2010
From 2000-2010, I did a bunch of consulting gigs at 3Com, Abbott, Aon, Astra Zeneca, Elan, Genworth Financial, Glaxo SmithKline, Healthways, Herbalife, Metlife, Northwestern Mutual, Pfizer, Sun Microsystems and XL Re, via Infosys, largely based out of Chicago/Milwaukee.

Patents

US11475372B2
Evolved machine learning models (H2O.ai Driverless AI)
US9934299B2
Systems and methods for interest-driven data visualization systems utilizing visualization image data and trellised visualizations
US9824127B2
Systems and methods for interest-driven data visualization systems utilized in interest-driven business intelligence systems

Languages

I like tinkering with programming languages.

Music

I dabble in music production and sound design.

Studio Gear
Electron Octatrack, MPC Live II, SP-404 MkII, Audient Evo 16 (gift from best buddy and partner in crime Jeff), Torso T-1, Maschine, Roland FA-06 Workstation, Minilogue XD, Electribe, Dreadbox Typhon, Neutron, TD-3-MO (great little TB-303 clone with devilfish mod), Novation Launchkey 4, couple of Launchpads, Ableton Live w/ Max/MSP and a bunch of VSTs collected over 20 years. Also play a Sonor Jungle kit (big Jojo Mayer fan) with Zildjian/Paiste cymbals and Tama hardware. Also have a great-sounding Reverend Jetstream with a triple P-90 configuration. But I suck at drums and guitar - maybe someday :) My son loves playing guitar and has his own YouTube channel.