Abhinai Srivastava

Founder & CEO Mashgin

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Abhinai Srivastava is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Mashgin, a company he started in October 2012 that builds computer-vision self-checkout kiosks. The distinguishing capability is that the system identifies an entire tray of items simultaneously, by sight, without barcodes, RFID tags, or the customer orienting anything — a genuinely hard computer vision problem, since the machine must recognize arbitrary products at arbitrary angles, including items like prepared food that carry no barcode at all. The systems are deployed at more than 400 locations worldwide. Srivastava came to it after a decade in applied machine learning at Yahoo, Microsoft, and Facebook.

Career Highlights

• Founded Mashgin in October 2012 and leads it as CEO.
• Raised a $62.5 million Series B in 2022 at a $1.5 billion valuation, led by NEA.
• Grew deployment past 400 locations worldwide across retail and foodservice.
• As a founding member of Microsoft’s adLab team, helped create the relevance algorithm behind Microsoft’s advertising and built the first version of the Bing Knowledge Graph.
• Began as a data scientist at Yahoo in 2001, before the title was in common use.
• Holds a BTech in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.

Professional Journey

Srivastava studied computer science at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and began his career at Yahoo in 2001 doing what would later be called data science, at a point when the discipline had neither the name nor the tooling it has now. He moved to Microsoft as a founding member of the adLab team, the research group behind the company’s advertising technology, where he helped build the relevance algorithm used across Microsoft’s advertising and constructed the first version of what became the Bing Knowledge Graph — the structured representation of entities and their relationships that underpins search results beyond simple keyword matching. He then worked as a data scientist at Facebook.

He founded Mashgin in October 2012 around a problem that self-checkout had never actually solved. Conventional self-checkout moves the labour of scanning from a cashier to the customer, item by item, with each product presented barcode-first to a reader — slow, error-prone, and impossible for anything unbarcoded, which in practice means most prepared food. The theoretical alternative, computer vision, had been discussed for years and not delivered, because recognizing arbitrary retail items visually, at arbitrary orientations, fast enough that a queue does not form, is a substantially harder problem than recognizing a barcode.

Mashgin built exactly that: a kiosk where a customer sets an entire tray down at once and the system identifies every item simultaneously, in about a second, without any scanning action at all. The natural early markets were the ones conventional self-checkout served worst — stadium concessions, corporate cafeterias, convenience stores, and other high-volume foodservice settings where queues form at predictable peaks and where much of the inventory has no barcode.

The company raised a $62.5 million Series B in 2022 at a $1.5 billion valuation, led by NEA, and its systems reached more than 400 deployed locations worldwide.

Education

Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

BTech, Computer Science