curriculum vitae · 2026
Berkeley, CA · UC Berkeley
two companies · one exit
co-founder & cto · wrodium

One builder,
Every layer

Arlen Kumar builds knowledge-freshness infrastructure at Wrodium and studies how retrieval-augmented LLMs cite the web at UC Berkeley's Hearst Lab. Two-time founder with a prior exit, co-author of the GEO-16 benchmark, shipping from schema to shaders.

[email protected]
See the work → Download PDF
01 / The thesis

The next great buyer isn't a person

It's an agent that browses, compares, decides, and pays — while the humans wander away from their days of clicks. But the web was built for eyes and thumbs, so brands get filtered out before the deal ever comes.

So he builds the translator: fresh, structured, and true. Schema, citations, and crawl-fresh knowledge, so the old web can talk to the buyers brand-new.

02 / Where he showed up
01 2024 → now

Co-Founder & CTO, Wrodium

Berkeley SkyDeck Batch 21 — Most Innovative Technology award. Closing a $1.5M pre-seed at a $15M post-money cap. Architected the entire product: Living Articles, the Semantic Resonance Engine, and the WebMCP layer.

02 hearst lab

Researcher, UC Berkeley

NLP & IR under Prof. Marti Hearst. Co-authored the GEO-16 benchmark (arXiv:2509.10762) and CHASE, published at COLM 2026, on knowledge freshness and citation behavior in retrieval-augmented LLMs.

03 acquired

Founder, Air Quake Simulations

Founded at 19, exited. VR flight-simulator hardware — F-18 cockpit systems, 3D-printed at 10× below industry price. Shipped hundreds of units before acquisition, plus an AI VR training platform in Python + PyTorch.

03 / Wrodium, in depth

GEO measured in dollars, not vibes

Designed a revenue-weighted GEO framework — Conversion Potential Score, Prompt-to-Revenue Velocity, AI Traffic CAC — turning generative engine optimization into real dollar attribution across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude, in a market growing 34% a year.

  • Closing a $1.5M pre-seed at a $15M post-money cap — Verdict Capital, 359 Capital, Harlem Capital & The House Fund.
  • Architected Living Articles, the Semantic Resonance Engine, ClawdBot/OpenClaw, Wrodium Roast & the WebMCP layer.
  • Shipped client wins — Quotr, Robin Woolard, Aparti, ScamAI, Multiplier: Wikidata disambiguation, schema, llms.txt & citation tracking.
  • Built GTM end-to-end: 17-inbox outbound on Instantly + Apollo, the SAFE workflow, Delaware filings & the Supabase → InsForge migration.
wrodium · scroll-driven
05 / Toolkit

The whole kit, one object

From Python to proofs, from fresh crawls to schema. Production RAG, agentic tool use, MCP and the WebMCP spec, eval harnesses, grounding and citation enforcement — plus the operations side: SAFEs, cap tables, outbound, and hiring.

arlen.json · the stack 
{
  "languages":  ["Python", "TypeScript", "Lean 4", "SQL", "Bash"],
  "freshness":  ["recrawl scheduling", "staleness scoring",
                 "AI-bot crawl analytics", "citation drift"],
  "retrieval":  ["pgvector", "HNSW", "hybrid dense+BM25",
                 "cross-encoder re-ranking", "nDCG/MRR"],
  "llm":        ["production RAG", "MCP + WebMCP", "evals"],
  "semantic":   ["schema.org/JSON-LD", "Wikidata (Q138634126)"],
  "ml":         ["PyTorch", "benchmark design", "econometrics"],
  "operations": ["YC SAFEs", "cap tables", "fundraising"]
}  // uniforms updated automatically, every week
06 / The school part
Three
majors.

B.A. in Computer Science, Data Science & Economics — UC Berkeley, Spring 2026. Research and rhetoric on the side:

  • Research on AI deepfakes as an epistemological break
  • Lean 4 formalization of GEO-16 for CS 294-268
  • In talks with CalCompute (CA SB 53) on auditable AI infra
  • CITRIS speaker — "The Ad-ification of AI," Feb 2026
berkeley · spring 2026
07 / Contact

The future needs builders —
one of them's here

Pick up the phone, drop a line, say hello. Berkeley, CA · (669) 292-8054.

Email Arlen → github @arlenk2021