Robert Xu is Co-Founder and CTO at Ishiki Labs, a Y Combinator Winter 2026 company building socially aware AI that knows when to stay silent and when to contribute in real-time conversations.

Robert spent 4 years at Meta building advanced orchestration systems for multimodal assistants on smart glasses and Orion AR glasses, optimizing for latency and compute. He previously worked on research infrastructure at Citadel Securities.

Robert specializes in distributed systems and low-latency multimodal AI systems, with deep expertise in building real-time AI assistants for wearable devices.

Ishiki Labs launched Fern, an AI meeting copilot that provides real-time coaching and task delegation during conversations, operating in both visible participant and invisible shadow modes. The company is part of Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch.

Ishiki Labs is pioneering conscious intelligence layers for AI to gain social awareness, powering next-generation interfaces including voice assistants, smart glasses, and embodied robots.