Anand Ramanathan

I'm an independent developer and applied AI scientist running MLAI LLC. I build personalized, local-first, privacy-focused AI experiences. I am passionate about AI-based personalized experiences for human end users. Local-first, privacy-focused, personalized.

My career spans multiple stints at Microsoft and Amazon, plus startups and consulting - with work across enterprise platforms, consumer apps, developer APIs, educational games, and most recently, applied AI. Most recently I was Principal ML Scientist at Ripcord, where I built and launched Docufai - a chat-with-your-documents app using generative AI. Before that, Microsoft AutoML (Data Scientist, 2018–2020) and the founding team of Microsoft BizTalk Server at the start of my career.

I hold a B.E. from IIT Roorkee and I'm listed on Toptal as a leading applied scientist in LLM/GPT applications.

My current focus is Maibook - an on-device community of personalized AI agents for Mac and Windows, and the flagship product of MLAI LLC. Beyond Maibook, I work across local AI (Apple MLX, Ollama), agent frameworks, multimodal applications, and Obsidian-based personal knowledge systems. I am a daily power user of Claude Code at the super-expert level, well beyond coding - for knowledge work, multi-agent orchestration, content pipelines, and personalized just-in-time interfaces.

A consistent pattern across this work: independently arriving at ideas that later became mainstream. Built a no-code platform years before Webflow and Bubble hit the wave; built visual knowledge graphs over the web before Google's Knowledge Graph entity panels became familiar; ran private multi-LLM-council experiments - a precursor to the now popular LLM Council; ran Claude-Code-on-Obsidian workflows - before they became famous as "AI second brain" and LLM Wiki.

Current & Recent

Earlier Highlights

Multiple earlier stints at Microsoft and Amazon spanning enterprise, consumer, API, and developer-experience work:

• Microsoft BizTalk Server - member of the founding team for Microsoft's flagship enterprise integration server.
• Microsoft Outlook - .NET Outlook API and developer tooling.
• Service delivery platforms - WCF REST API and Visual Studio tooling for service-oriented platforms.
• Amazon - cloud architecture and distributed systems.
• Thouwords LLC - founder; visual knowledge-graph layer over the web.
• iOS educational games - 9 shipped titles with 30K+ downloads.

Across these: enterprise platforms, consumer apps, developer APIs, educational games, and now applied AI. Full details on Toptal.

Education

B.E. in Engineering - Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee

Certifications & Courses

Seven themes that connect everything I've built across 20+ years.