Pavan Kalyan Tankala is Co-Founder and CEO at Ritivel, an AI-native platform for regulatory document submission in life sciences backed by Y Combinator Winter 2026. Ritivel's AI agents draft CTDs, CSRs, INDs, and BLAs in minutes instead of weeks, helping drugs reach patients faster.

Pavan graduated from IIT Bombay with BTech and MTech in Electrical Engineering and AI, then worked as a Research Fellow at Microsoft Research focused on training language models. He has published research at top conferences including NeurIPS, ACL, and Interspeech.

After 50+ conversations with pharma professionals, Pavan and his co-founders discovered the critical bottleneck in regulatory submissions where delays cost pharma companies $45M per month in lost revenue. The team previously built AI copilots at Microsoft Research.

Ritivel deploys AI agents that generate comprehensive first drafts in Microsoft Word, following FDA formatting requirements and pulling from existing clinical data. The platform integrates with SharePoint, Veeva, and Outlook to automate document retrieval and follow-ups.

Founded in 2025 with co-founders Nirmit Arora and Gunin Gupta, Ritivel is part of Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch and is based in San Francisco. The company addresses a critical need where regulatory teams spend months synthesizing thousands of pages of clinical data for FDA submissions.