Babak Hassibi is Co-Founder and CEO of PrismML and the inaugural Mose and Lillian S. Bohn Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech. He is an Iranian-American electrical engineer, computer scientist, and applied mathematician pioneering ultra-efficient AI.

Babak earned his B.S. from the University of Tehran, then his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1993 and 1996 under advisor Thomas Kailath. He joined Caltech as a faculty member in 2001, rising to full professor and serving as Executive Officer of Electrical Engineering from 2008 to 2015.

Babak is a recipient of the 2003 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) and the 2003 David and Lucille Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering. His research spans information theory, signal processing, control theory, and machine learning.

Prior to PrismML, Babak co-founded Neural Propulsion Systems in 2018, serving as Co-Founder and Chief Technologist, applying his deep expertise in signal processing and mathematical engineering to autonomous systems. He has spent decades building foundational research at Caltech that underpins PrismML's core technology.

PrismML emerged from stealth in March 2026 with $16.25M in SAFE and seed funding, backed by Khosla Ventures and Cerberus Ventures. Its flagship 1-bit Bonsai 8B model is 14x smaller, 8x faster, and 5x more energy efficient than full-precision 8B models, representing the world's first commercially viable 1-bit LLM.