The Digital Human Experts

Using our expertise in computer vision, generative models and
machine learning to bring you the best avatars with the least friction.
Naureen Mahmood
Naureen was one of the earliest members of the Perceiving Systems group at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. She is a key author of several SIGGRAPH papers, and has been deeply involved in developing multiple groundbreaking 3D human body modeling and motion capture technologies.
Co-founder | CEO

Naureen Mahmood

Talha Zaman
Talha is an experienced engineering leader who helped build Kyruus, an enterprise startup transforming healthcare through big data, and earlier worked at Google. Prior to Meshcapade, he focused on turning research into production quality software at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems.
Co-founder | CTO

Talha Zaman

Michael Black
Michael is a founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and an honorary professor at the University of Tübingen. He is a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and a member of the German Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina. He co-founded Body Labs Inc. and was a Distinguished Scientist at Amazon. He serves as the speaker of Cyber Valley, Europe’s largest AI ecosystem. His pioneering research on virtual humans was a foundation for Meshcapade.
Co-founder | Chief Scientist

Michael Black

Nicolas Keller
Nicolas joined Meshcapade after falling in love with it as one of Meshcapade‘s angel investors and is responsible for all things that sound suspiciously vague - including Business Development. Previously, he dabbled in the dark arts of venture capital as a Venture Partner at Vsquared Ventures, a European deep tech VC fund. Prior to his life in VC, he was the VP Business Development & one of many co-founders at Franka Emika, a leading robotics and embodied AI startup.
VP Business Development

Nicolas Keller

Nicolas Heron
Nick is an accomplished Technology and Software Development Executive with 18 years of experience in Start-up environments and 6 years at Amazon. His experience and skills have been applied to various industries, from defense, banking and storage virtualization to medical devices, nano-technology, 3D modeling, and Generative AI. Prior to Meshcapade, Nick was heading the visual GenAI team in Fashion and Fitness at Amazon.
Wizard

Nicolas Heron

Anica Wilhelm
Anica brings together tech, sales and ops, and thus loves being the translator between her colleagues and different stakeholders to keep things moving at a fast pace. She studied business informatics with a focus on Big Data and AI. Previously, she worked at Deutsche Telekom and replex, an IT startup which was acquired by Cisco AppDynamics.
Operations Manager

Anica Wilhelm

Sherine Nouh
Sherine is an accomplished technical sales professional and business consultant who worked earlier at Microsoft, Oracle and Dell EMC. She previously helped drive business growth by guiding numerous customers to adopt the right technologies for their needs and unlock potential opportunities. Her educational background includes a Masters of Science in Information Management and Business Technology from Loughborough University in the UK.
Sales & Growth Manager

Sherine Nouh

Nikolas Hesse
Nikolas is a Machine Learning Scientist working at the intersection of computer vision and medicine. Before joining Meshcapade, he was a research associate at Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation (IOSB), and completed his Ph.D. at University of Freiburg. Nikolas continues to be a post-doctoral fellow at Children’s Hospital, Zürich while consulting for Meshcapade.
ML scientist

Nikolas Hesse

Denis Heid
Denis brings together computer graphics and machine learning applications, molding them into pipelines and software products. Previously, he worked at IBM as a DevOps Engineer and graduated at the University Tübingen (M.Sc) with a focus on computer graphics and deep learning.
Backend Engineer

Denis Heid

Stefan Dachwitz
Stefan has been dabbling with computer graphics software since the days of the apple][ and finished his CS studies with a focus on interactive and graphical systems. After some experience with SGI computers and medical image processing, he joined aliaswavefront to work on Maya. He loved working on interactive installations, developed web apps and map rendering at HERE, and is now working for Meshcapade as a Graphics Engineer.
Web developer - 3D Graphics

Stefan Dachwitz

Antonia Beller
Coming from a background of biology, Antonia discovered her passion for software engineering during her master thesis. After obtaining a second masters degree in Bioinformatics she spent one year doing research at the University of Tübingen before joining Meshcapade as a Backend Engineer.
Backend Engineer

Antonia Beller

Nitin Saini
Nitin is a Machine Learning Scientist working in the field of 3D computer vision. He is interested in human motion and appearance reconstruction from videos. During his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, he developed a markerless aerial mocap system for long-range outdoor human motion capture. He has worked for Adobe Research and Samsung Research.
ML scientist

Nitin Saini

Gabriele Calissi
Gabriele is a Web Developer, passionate about technology all around. He fell in love with virtual reality and started a new journey, learning about the wonderful world of 3D. With a background in consulting he’s ready to solve problems and delivering great products to keep customers happy. Favorite technologies: React, ThreeJS and Blender!
Frontend Web Developer

Gabriele Calissi

Nathan Bajandas
Nathan's primary role is integration — bringing Meshcapade's technologies into platforms such as Unreal and Blender. Additionally, he helps with avatar and synthetic data generation. He joins Meshcapade with a background in building VR, desktop, and mobile training applications for various professions such as scuba divers, mechanics, and pilots.
3D Graphics Engineer

Nathan Bajandas

Matteo Maponi
Matteo is a senior DevOps Engineer and automation enthusiast. He has a wide-spanning academic background - covering ML, NLP, and AI, but he focuses on Kubernetes, Terraform, and CI/CD pipelining. Prior to Meshcapade he worked at Nuance Communications (Microsoft), where he built and maintained several K8S clusters as part of the Infrastructure team. He believes that humans should focus their time on what matters most.
DevOps Engineer

Matteo Maponi

Mona Wu
Mona is a 3D artist studying Creative Media and Game Technologies at the Saxion University of Applied Science in Enschede, the Netherlands. Pursuing this study comes from her passion for games, as well as drawing in her leisure time.
3D Rendering Artist Intern

Mona Wu

Radu Alexandru Rosu
Alex is a Machine Learning Scientist working at the intersection of deep learning and computer graphics. During his PhD at the University of Bonn, he focused on 3D reconstruction from images and real-time rendering methods. Before joining Meshcapade, he interned at Reality Labs where he worked on new methods for the reconstruction and rendering of strand-based hair.
ML scientist

Radu Alexandru Rosu

Sun Yu
Yu is a Machine Learning Scientist with a focus on 3D human analysis. During his Ph.D. at the Harbin Institute of Technology and interning at JD.com, he pioneered a series of one-stage & real-time methods - namely ROMP, BEV, and TRACE - for estimating 3D human pose, shape, and trajectory from monocular images. Outside of work, he enjoys exploring natural landscapes and observing wildlife.
ML scientist

Sun Yu

Yao Feng
Yao Feng is a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and ETH Zurich, where she is supervised by Michael J. Black and Marc Pollefeys. Her research focuses on democratizing digital avatar creation, aiming to broaden its accessibility to a wider audience.
ML scientist

Yao Feng

David Smith
David enjoys working at the intersection of research and software engineering. He was an early employee at Meshcapade's sibling startup, Body Labs, where he acted as engineering lead for their cloud services team and later as an applied CV/ML researcher, developing techniques for estimating human body shape from a single image. He's currently working part time as a software engineer on the ML team.
Software Engineer

David Smith

Emiliano Rallo
Emiliano is a recent NYU Film & TV graduate, with a unique blend of creative and technical skills. His extensive filmmaking background, coupled with experience as a capture artist at EA, has honed his expertise in crafting visual narratives. As a Concept and Content Creation Artist, he will produce a diverse range of videos and visual content, shaping Meshcapade’s public image through creative marketing and storytelling strategies.
Concept and Content Creation Artist

Emiliano Rallo

Simay Esmek
As an experienced UX/UI designer with a background in AI, Automotive, and Engineering products, Simay integrates insights from both large companies and small startups into her work. Before starting her professional career, her creative journey began at the age 13, when she was creating and selling 3D clothing for the Sims series. Thanks to this early exposure in 3D body modelling technologies, she's excited to be part of the journey towards enabling digital humans.
UX/UI Designer

Simay Esmek

Claudia García
Claudia García is a Telecommunication Engineer who fell in love with DevOps and automation worlds. Before Meshcapade she worked as a member of the Engineering Productivity team at VMware. She was responsible for maintaining several Kubernetes clusters and infrastructure as code. She was also part of the design and develop the CI/CD Gitlab/Jenkins.
Infrastructure Engineer

Claudia García

Yan Zhang
Yan Zhang is a machine learning scientist at Meshcapade. His research covers a wide range of topics on human-centric AI, in particular on human motion and behavior modeling, generative models, 3D human perception, as well as their applications in graphics, mixed reality, architecture design, an beyond. Before Joining Meshcapade, he was a postdoc researcher at ETH Zurich, and has served as area chairs for 3DV'24 and CVPR'24.
ML scientist

Yan Zhang

Jing Lin
Jing is a third-year Master student from Tsinghua University. His research lies in the field of 3D human-scene perception, generation, and reasoning with large foundation model. Now Jing is a machine learning scientist intern at Meshcapade. His research focuses on human-related large foundation model. Jing like playing football and watching movie in his free time.
ML intern

Jing Lin

Keyu Wu
Keyu is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate focusing on CG and CV at Zhejiang University. His research lies in the field of hair, especially for image-based hair modeling. Now Keyu is a machine learning scientist intern at Meshcapade. His research focuses on 3D hair modeling.
ML intern

Keyu Wu

Alpár Cseke
Before joining Meshcapade, Alpár already had two years of experience with the underlying body models, working as Research Assistant at the Perceiving Systems group of Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. Right now, he is part-time getting familiar with Meshcapade tech, part-time finishing his Master’s thesis at MPI-IS, in which he focuses on exploiting contact information for the reconstruction of human-object interactions in 3D from single-view images.
ML Ops Engineer

Alpár Cseke

Muhammed Kocabas
Muhammed Kocabas is a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and ETH Zurich, where he is supervised by Michael J. Black and Otmar Hilliges. He was previously research scientist intern at Apple Machine Learning Research and NVIDIA Research teams. His research focuses on human motion capture, hand pose estimation, and 3D human avatar creation.
ML intern

Muhammed Kocabas

Our Advisors

Leaders in industry and academics with years of experience,
bringing together the best of avatar technology.
Dr. Silvia Zuffi
Dr. Silvia Zuffi is a research scientist at the CNR Institute for Applied Mathematics and affiliated researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (Tübingen, Germany). She holds a degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Bologna, and a PhD from Brown University (Procidence, RI). Her research interests span from colour imaging and reproduction to machine learning, computer vision and graphics, with focus on motion capture and 3D modelling of humans and animals.
Scientific Advisor

Dr. Silvia Zuffi

Andrew Hamel
Andrew is a former senior executive at Amazon and a recognized leader in digital transformation strategies. Hamel spent more than a decade with Amazon, where he led development of core technical services including the company’s search function, recommendation engines, and other machine-learning strategies. Andrew knows how to build and manage large teams and how to deliver mission critical software at Enterprise scale.
Advisor | Investor

Andrew Hamel

Weiyang Liu
Weiyang Liu is currently conducting research at University of Cambridge and Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. His research focuses on designing principled algorithms for training/adapting foundation models. His works have received 2023 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award, Best Demo Award at HCOMP 2022 and multiple oral/spotlight presentations at conferences such as ICLR, NeurIPS and CVPR.
Advisor

Weiyang Liu

A spinoff from

In collaboration with