Marco Mascorro

Mascorro has said he began programming in assembly and C at about 12 after discovering and loving Microchip’s PIC microcontrollers, built robots from childhood, and later joined FIRST Robotics and multiple robotics competitions; he began working with lidar-based SLAM, visual SLAM, and convolutional neural networks around the AlexNet era of about 2012.⁠[1][1]

Before teaching at Singularity UniversitySingularity UniversitySingularity University is a technology and leadership education organization founded by Peter H. Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil. It offers short executive programs, organizational training and support for entrepreneurs, focusing on rapidly developing technologies and their social and business implications.Open the full entry, Mascorro worked at BMW in Munich, Germany, on robotics and new vehicle design, and has said some of his designs appear in the 2014 MINI Cooper.⁠[1]

In 2011, while doing computer vision research at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology in Japan, Mascorro used visual SLAM to develop KuruRobo, an autonomous wheelchair robot for people with disabilities; during his time in Japan he also took part in AI and robotics research related to the response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster.⁠[2][1]

From 2012 to 2014, Mascorro was an AI and Robotics Teaching Fellow at Singularity University on the NASA campus in Silicon Valley, working with Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis to study rapid advances in AI.⁠[1]

Mascorro co-founded the AI and robotics company Fellow Robots (later renamed Fellow AI) in the San Francisco Bay Area with former NASA astronaut Dan Barry, building and deploying autonomous robots for retail stores, warehouses, and factories. In 2014, the company launched robots including LoweBot and OSHbot with major retailers.⁠[1][1]

LoweBot, OSHbot, and NAVii are autonomous robots that help customers find items in stores and scan inventory overnight using computer vision; they were deployed at retailers in the United States and Japan, including Lowe’s, BevMo, Sam’s Club, Yamada Denki, and Parco, as well as in warehouses and factories.⁠[2][2]

In 2016, Mascorro trained a locally running single-shot convolutional neural network for a tool called SIMPL, which lets users program industrial robot arms without writing code by drawing bounding boxes over objects in an interface.⁠[2]

Amid the 2020 ventilator shortage during the COVID-19 pandemic, Mascorro built an open-source ventilator that helped more than 200 teams worldwide build and deploy ventilators, with the first version running on a Raspberry Pi; he also helped make a contact-tracing device using ultra-wideband ranging that reminds people to keep their distance through haptic feedback and records every contact within 10 feet.⁠[2][2]

In 2023, Mascorro built and deployed Llama2.ai, which he describes as the first chatbot interface for the Llama 2 models; it became the most popular interface when Mark Zuckerberg announced Llama 2 and reached more than 3,000 concurrent requests on 100 load-balanced servers and hundreds of H100 GPUs, and it was later handed over to Replicate. That year he also launched JungleGym, an open-source playground for testing and developing autonomous agents with benchmarks such as WebArena and Mind2Web in sandboxed websites, and created arXivGPT, an X bot that picks trending AI papers on arXiv and posts summaries.⁠[2][2][2][2]

Mascorro was formerly a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, investing in AI infrastructure companies. On August 1, 2024, a16z announced its seed investment in Black Forest Labs, an open visual model company led by Stable Diffusion co-creators Robin Rombach, Patrick Esser, and Andreas Blattmann; Mascorro was one of the announcement’s authors and says he led the round.⁠[3][3][3][4]

On August 22, 2024, a16z announced its Series A investment in Cursor, an AI coding editor built as a fork of VS Code; Mascorro was again one of the authors and says he led the round. At a16z he also led the seed rounds of Thinking Machines and Waveforms AI.⁠[5][5][4]

In December 2024, Mascorro spent about two and a half weeks entering the ARC-AGI competition on Kaggle with a set of models he trained, placing 14th out of 1,427 teams, in the top 1%, and earning a silver medal; the competition required models to run offline on a single P100 GPU or two T4 GPUs, and he used Llama 3 and Qwen models.⁠[2][2][2][2][2]

In August 2025, Mascorro published a personal AI workstation design for founders of a16z portfolio companies, with four NVIDIA RTX 6000 Pro Blackwell Max-Q GPUs totaling 384GB of VRAM, small enough to sit under a desk and running on a standard 15A/120V outlet, at a parts cost of about $39,500; the first one he built was signed by Nvidia founder Jensen Huang.⁠[6][2][2]

On February 9, 2026, a16z announced an investment in Shizuku AI, which is building AI companions and characters in Japan, with Mascorro among the authors; on March 19, he and Martin Casado announced that a16z was leading the Series A of Deeptune, which builds reinforcement learning environments.⁠[7][7][8][8]

On March 9, 2026, Mascorro and Joan Cabezas published a post on integrating the computer-use agent benchmark OSWorld into the evaluation framework Harbor, allowing agents to be evaluated at scale on Ubuntu and Windows desktops in Daytona cloud sandboxes and on bare-metal servers.⁠[9][10]

As of October 2026, Mascorro was no longer a partner at a16z and was researching large language model interpretability and returning to robotics, based in San Francisco.⁠[11][1][11]

Beyond his a16z investments, Mascorro has personally invested in companies including Veeda AI, Mechanize (leading its seed round), Runpod (its first check), SF Compute, Embra AI (later acquired by Notion), Stack AI (later acquired by Asana), AirGarage, and General Proximity.⁠[4]

Mascorro lists several side projects on his website, including a bartender robot he built for a friend’s robot party that later appeared at many events and a wedding, a robot dog that takes voice commands, built at a Llama 2 hackathon, and AnyPod.ai, which searches YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry videos and podcasts using Whisper and vector search.⁠[12][12][12][2]

He is a fan of Japanese culture and has lived in both San Francisco and Japan; he met many friends while living at the Archive hacker house and often works on side projects on weekends at MadSci, a robotics hacker studio near Alamo Square in San Francisco. In February 2018, Sam AltmanSam AltmanSam Altman is an entrepreneur and investor, and the co-founder and chief executive officer of OpenAI. He previously served as president of Y Combinator and founded the location-based social service Loopt. He also helped found Tools for Humanity and Merge Labs, has invested in energy and life sciences ventures, and has driven public discussion of AI governance, employment, and wealth distribution.Open the full entry visited their house to discuss universal basic income, artificial general intelligence, and the UBI research pilot run by Y Combinator.⁠[1][1][10]

Personal website: https://www.mascobot.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[11]

X: Public account: https://x.com/Mascobot (opens in a new window)⁠[3]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcomascorro/ (opens in a new window)⁠[3]

Andreessen Horowitz: Official website: https://a16z.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[3]