Siddharth Gutta is Co-Founder and CTO at Refiant AI, a South Africa-founded startup pioneering nature-inspired AI model compression to drastically reduce the energy and compute costs of artificial intelligence.

Siddharth studied Economics and History at the University of Texas at Austin (Red McCombs School of Business), where he also founded Entree, a restaurant order-ahead platform, and co-founded Radix Prep, an online tutoring marketplace.

A vocal advocate for sustainable AI, Siddharth champions the principle that the industry must make AI itself more efficient rather than defaulting to ever-larger data center infrastructure.

At Refiant, Siddharth leads the technical vision alongside co-founders Dr. Viroshan Naicker and Mathew Haswell, building a team that includes a former Google Cloud architect, a Cambridge PhD researcher, and an engineer with NASA experience.

Refiant has demonstrated compression of a 120-billion-parameter AI model to run on a standard laptop with just 12GB of RAM, retaining 95-99% performance while using over 80% less energy, and has raised $5M in seed funding led by VoLo Earth Ventures.