creators

Robert Nishihara: Anyscale co-founder, Ray creator

Robert Nishihara co-created Ray at UC Berkeley and co-founded Anyscale, which agreed in July 2026 to be acquired by the AI cloud company Nscale.

Robert Nishihara is a co-founder of Anyscale and a co-creator of Ray, an open-source framework for scaling Python and AI workloads across machine and GPU clusters. He read mathematics at Harvard, then took a Berkeley PhD in 2019 on systems and algorithms for distributed machine learning; Ray grew out of the AMPLab and RISELab there. In 2019 he co-founded Anyscale with Philipp Moritz, Ion Stoica and Michael I. Jordan, launching with $20.6 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. As chief executive he raised a $100 million Series C in December 2021 at a $1 billion valuation; the company's customers include Coinbase, Bedrock Robotics and Runway. In July 2024 Anyscale named Keerti Melkote chief executive, and Nishihara moved to customer work and product strategy. Anyscale gave Ray to the PyTorch Foundation in October 2025. On 30 July 2026 it signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Nscale, expected to close in the second half of 2026; Nishihara co-signed the post announcing it.

Specialization

distributed systems, AI compute infrastructure, open-source software, machine learning systems

Country

United States