Engineer · Builder · Creator
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Short, factual answers about Antony Austin's background, engineering work, companies, and availability. Every answer is self-contained, so it can be read or quoted on its own.
Antony Austin is an Applied Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering undergraduate at Rajagiri School of Engineering & Technology (RSET) in Kochi, India, graduating in 2027. He has 3+ years of hands-on experience across VLSI design, embedded systems, robotics, and AI/ML, and is Co-founder and CTO of the robotics startup VirtusCo.
He specialises in four areas: VLSI and semiconductor design, embedded systems and RTOS firmware, robotics with ROS 2, and applied AI/ML. His deepest work spans SystemVerilog RTL design, Zephyr RTOS on Nordic nRF5340 hardware, ROS 2 Jazzy navigation stacks, and transformer language models built from scratch in PyTorch.
He is based in Kochi, Kerala, India, and works remotely with clients worldwide. He is currently a remote firmware developer for a US-based startup, has delivered web projects for clients in Australia and India, and takes freelance ROS 2 work internationally through Fiverr. All freelance pricing is quoted in USD.
VirtusCo is a pre-seed robotics startup Antony co-founded in January 2025, where he serves as CTO and sole software architect. The team of five is building Virtus, an autonomous B2B airport luggage porter robot. It is IEDC incubated and targeting deployment at Bangalore International Airport's BIAL Startup Valley.
Noviq is a web and AI studio Antony founded in March 2026 in Kochi. It delivers Next.js and WordPress websites, Flutter mobile apps, and AI-powered WhatsApp and Telegram chatbots for local businesses. It has delivered one paid client project end-to-end so far.
Antony Austin works as a remote firmware developer for ASAT, a US-based startup, while studying full time in Kerala. He builds Bluetooth Low Energy firmware on Nordic SoCs using Zephyr RTOS and the nRF Connect SDK, working across wireless connectivity, real-time scheduling and multi-core SoC configuration. Project specifics are covered by an NDA.
He led and mentored three batches of 15 students as Head of the Electronics Club at Model Technical HSS IHRD from 2019 to 2023, starting at age 14. He currently serves as an Apptronics event coordinator at RSET, organising science and technology events for the college's technical fest.
Antony Austin joined NeuroTech Labs in July 2026 as an Embedded Systems Intern, a role running to March 2027. The work covers firmware development and hardware bring-up, alongside his ongoing freelance robotics engagements and his role as CTO of VirtusCo.
Yes. He built a 253-million-parameter LLaMA-style transformer entirely from scratch in PyTorch, running on modest consumer hardware. He progressed from an RNN-based text generator to MiniGPT, a 4.6M-parameter model trained on CPU, and then to the 253M model. The code is on GitHub as Transformer-Virtue-v2.
He is completing an M.Tech-level research thesis on electrothermal simulation of Phase Change Memory (PCM) devices, modelled in COMSOL Multiphysics at RSET. PCM is a non-volatile memory technology that stores data by switching a chalcogenide material between amorphous and crystalline states. He began the thesis in 2026.
He built a complete ROS 2 Jazzy stack from scratch on a Raspberry Pi 5 for VirtusCo's autonomous porter robot, including a YDLidar X4 Pro driver written entirely from scratch because no vendor SDK existed. He also designed an ESP32 Kalman filter fusing ToF, ultrasonic, and microwave sensors.
The 32-Bit Tiny GPU is a SIMT graphics processor Antony Austin built from scratch in SystemVerilog, designed solo from the instruction set to a manufacturable silicon layout. It has true SIMT branch divergence with warp-stack reconvergence, the axelcc C-subset compiler, 391 cocotb tests, and a signoff-clean GDSII on SkyWater 130 nm.
Yes. He took his 32-bit SIMT GPU through OpenLane 2.3.10 to a signoff-clean GDSII on SkyWater Sky130A, placing 300,884 standard cells on a 7.97 square millimetre die with zero Magic DRC violations and an LVS result matching uniquely across 188,812 devices. Post-route timing closes at about 32.9 MHz typical.
KULIRMA is a robot-based mobile sensing system for indoor air-flow measurement, developed as a consultancy project with VM Associates at RSET. The system uses a mobile robotic platform to take distributed air-flow readings across an indoor space. It earned Antony an Award of Appreciation from RSET in August 2025.
He works at expert level with ESP32, Raspberry Pi, I2C/SPI/UART, PCB design in Altium Designer, and oscilloscope and JTAG debugging. At proficient level he works with STM32, the Nordic nRF5340 with Zephyr RTOS, RTOS and BLE development, and KiCad and Eagle for PCB layout.
He works at expert level in Embedded C, C, and Python; at proficient level in C++ and SystemVerilog; and at competent level in VHDL and Verilog. For AI and machine learning he uses PyTorch, and for web development he uses TypeScript with Next.js and React.
Yes. He offers Arduino and ESP32 firmware from $20, ROS 2 application development from $25, n8n automation and AI agents from $45, PCB design from $100, and AI chatbot development from $500. Web development is quote-based. All services are delivered remotely worldwide and priced in USD.
Antony Austin is in his seventh semester of a BTech in Applied Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering at RSET, Kakkanad, running 2023 to 2027, with a CGPA of 7.9 out of 10 and a best semester of 9.07 SGPA. He holds nRF Connect SDK Fundamentals from Nordic Semiconductor.
He received an Award of Appreciation from RSET in August 2025 for the KULIRMA robotic air-flow sensing project. He took a podium finish in an RC Electric ATV competition against 12 colleges at Saintgits College in December 2024, and was named Best Performer at Srishti Robotics in 2019.
Email him at austinantony06@gmail.com, or use the contact form on his website. He is on GitHub as austin207, on LinkedIn as antony-austin-b7287226a, on X as @AntonyAustin19, on Hugging Face as Austin207, and publishes technical writing on Medium at @austinantony06.
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