Sameer Wagh

I’m a privacy-focused engineer fascinated by the ability to compute on data without ever seeing it. A decade in academia took me deep into that question; now I build the infrastructure for safe, collaborative AI — making collaboration the default without asking anyone to give up their data.

I run SecretBit Ventures, an independent research firm, and serve as a Senior Research Scientist at OpenMined and a Visiting Researcher at the University of Virginia.

Previously I led research and development at Devron, turning ideas like vertical federated learning and AI-driven privacy controls into shipped product. Before industry I spent nearly a decade in research: a postdoc at Berkeley’s RISE Lab with Raluca Ada Popa, a PhD at Princeton with Prateek Mittal, and a B.Tech. with Honors in Engineering Physics from IIT Madras.

My research spans secure multi-party computation, homomorphic encryption, federated learning, and differential privacy — with a single throughline: making privacy technologies practical enough to deploy. Several of these ideas now live in open-source projects and startups. See my publications and code, trace my academic lineage, or get in touch.

Affiliations & places