About
I'm Abhishek Nair, a mechanical engineer who ended up building robots and AI systems, and who now helps early-stage founders do the same with far less than they'd like to have. I live and work in Berlin.
The path ran through steel and power plants in India, a master's in mechanical engineering at HTW Berlin, deploying and operating autonomous sweepers at Enway, test automation for BSH appliances, leading an AI team at Carbon Freed, co-founding VoltVogel to build an EV-charging robot, and leading engineering and CE compliance for care robots at Bearcover. Today I'm co-founder and CTO of SoilFlux and technical consultant to an early-stage robotics startup.
Every one of those jobs had the same shape: a hard technical product, not enough people or money, and rules that could not be bent. I run Padawanabhi for founders in exactly that position.
Background
Early-stage robotics startup
2026 –
Technical consultant
Product and architecture decisions, hands-on on the robot stack and operator platform, hiring and building the engineering team.
SoilFlux
2026 –
Co-founder & CTO
The proof layer for crop inputs: helping makers of biologicals show where their products work.
Built the engine end to end: models, API and application. Berlin; Earlybird Vision Lab 2026.
Damalo
Feb – Jun 2026
Founding engineer
AI-native Microsoft consultancy; built the first product with AI compliance and privacy as requirements.
Bearcover
2025 – Jan 2026
Engineering & compliance lead
Led a team of seven building the ROS 2 stack for personal-care robots, from ROS 1 migration to production DevOps.
Architected the CE roadmap and delivered ISO 13482 compliance with the safety systems to back it.
VoltVogel
2023 – 2024
Co-founder & COO
Co-founded an EV-charging robotics startup with full technical ownership: OCPP 1.6, the ROS 2 robot, computer vision for docking.
Five paid pilots and twenty-plus customer interviews, then an honest wind-down.
Carbon Freed
2023 – 2024
Lead AI developer
Led a team of four shipping a document-intelligence pipeline above 95% accuracy across twenty-plus form types.
Azure microservices, a RAG assistant handling most inquiries alone, and retraining pipelines in production.
Bertrandt for BSH
2022
Software developer, electronic verification
Automated UI testing of smart appliances with computer vision, robot arms and haptic feedback; reverse-engineered CAN bus protocols for CI.
Enway
2020 – 2022
Operations & deployment manager
Owned the deployment lifecycle of autonomous sweepers: commissioning, customer training, maintenance, CE and EMC testing.
Built production ROS 2 packages, a SLAM mapping backpack and MPC control.
Carbon13
Domain expert
Domain expert in the venture builder programme: technical reality checks for climate-tech founding teams.
Education
- M.Sc. Mechanical EngineeringHTW Berlin
- B.Tech Mechanical and Automation EngineeringGGSIPU, New Delhi
Selected work
Projects and client work, with what each one taught me.
See the portfolioStart a conversation
Tell me what you're building and what's in the way. I reply within one business day, usually with a first thought, not a sales pitch.