Sepand Dyanatkar
| Sepand Dyanatkar | |
| Occupation | Entrepreneur, software engineer |
|---|---|
| Known for | Co-founder of OnDeck AI |
| Education | Master's in Machine Learning, University of Cambridge; B.Sc. in Computer Science and Physics, University of British Columbia |
Sepand Dyanatkar is a Canadian entrepreneur and machine learning engineer. He is a co-founder of OnDeck AI, a Vancouver-based startup that develops vision language models (VLMs) capable of analyzing video footage without requiring traditional model training or data labelling.[1]
Early life and education
Dyanatkar completed a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Physics at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. During his undergraduate studies, he was a research intern at Polytechnique Montréal's MIST Lab, where he worked on hierarchical robotic swarms. He was also involved with the UBC Rocket Engineering Design Team and published work on avionics processes at the International Astronautical Congress. From 2021 to 2022, he served as an elected board member of SEDS-Canada, a student-run space non-profit organisation.
In 2019, Dyanatkar interned at the European Space Agency's European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany, working on the Electronic FieldBook with the CAVES and PANGAEA team. He also held a software engineering internship at Amazon.
He subsequently earned a Master's degree in Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge, where his thesis focused on injecting resilience into multi-agent systems using reinforcement learning and graph neural networks.[2]
Career
Dyanatkar co-founded OnDeck AI alongside Alexander Dungate. The company, originally known as OnDeck Fisheries AI, initially focused on applying machine learning to fisheries monitoring. Early work involved using computer vision to review electronic monitoring footage on commercial fishing vessels.[3] The company later broadened its scope, developing what it describes as a general-purpose vision model that can perform complex visual analysis tasks — such as video search and classification — without the need for training data or data labelling.
OnDeck AI is a Y Combinator company and is based in Vancouver, British Columbia.[4] The company continued to work with halibut and black cod longliners as of 2026, applying vision language models to fisheries electronic monitoring as an alternative to traditional computer vision approaches, which require hundreds of thousands of labelled images for training.
Dyanatkar was named to the Hurun Canada Under30s list in 2023.[5]
References
- ↑ "OnDeck AI". 'OnDeck AI}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "Sepand Dyanatkar — Personal Website". 'sepand.me}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "OnDeck AI could revolutionize electronic monitoring". 'National Fisherman}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "OnDeck AI — Founding Machine Learning Engineer". 'Y Combinator}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "Hurun Canada Under30s 2023". 'Hurun Report}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.