Waterloo · --:-- 43.4643° N, 80.5204° W
Gunvir Dhesi Founding Engineer · Substrate
p. 01 / notes from the workbench

Gunvir
Dhesi

Builds products from the metal up.

Founding Engineer at Substrate. Engineering at the University of Waterloo, leaning toward embedded systems and ML.

Open a channel or flip to the builds ↓
target lock camera flight controller, C++ no pilot needed flies itself (mostly)
fig. 1: the hardware side. a drone that finds its own target
every screen one shared core listen think act agent loop one brain, many screens
fig. 2: the software side. one AI core behind every screen
Ch. 01 · Education

Departure

University of Waterloo. Engineering, Co-op.

Data structures, algorithms, embedded systems, digital logic and Verilog, assembly. Steering toward ML and AI.

currently building at Substrate →
Ch. 02 · Experience

The road

every stop so far
  1. 2025
    Substrate Industries Founding Engineer · Sep 2025 to now
    product design, UI, backend, AWS. primary on call.
  2. 2025
    Com-IT Innovation Software Engineering · Jan to Apr 2025
    700+ daily users, pages 35% faster
  3. 2024
    Affordable EBikes Engineering · May to Aug 2024
    ebikes, hands on engineering
  4. 2023
    Electrium Mobility Team Member, UWaterloo EV design team · Sep 2023 to now
    electric vehicles with the UW design team
  5. 2021
    Site4u, SigmaCoders, Quick Chat Founder, three ventures · 2021 to 2023
    started these in high school
Ch. 03 · Projects

Cargo

frames taped in, roughly in order of obsession
A wooden-chassis robot cart with a camera mast and laptop, built for the sidewalk-navigation project 97% over 5 km
FRAME 01 · 20 HZ · 92% mIoU

Autonomous sidewalk robot

Real time segmentation on a custom STM32 rig. 5 km of autonomous travel at 97% reliability.

Dinner with the Substrate team, San Francisco
FRAME 02 · FOUNDING ENGINEER

Substrate

Founding engineer on a digital equipment financing platform. Product design, UI and UX, backend, AWS.

Scratch-built Arduino drone in flight
FRAME 03 · THREE YEARS

Arduino drones

Two drones designed from scratch. Now teaching one to lock onto a target, in C++.

still crashing it, still learning
Site4u.ca work showcase
FRAME 04 · 25 PEOPLE · 30+ APPS

Site4u

Founded and ran the team. CI/CD cut deploys from 2 hours to 15 minutes.

Com-IT Innovation logo
FRAME 05 · 700+ DAILY USERS

Com-IT portal

React and Node.js. 35% faster page loads, OAuth 2.0 and JWT auth.

Electromagnetic roller coaster in motion
FRAME 06 · ONE MONTH

Electromagnetic roller coaster

Electromagnets and sensors control cart speed and keep carts from colliding.

also in the margins:

  • NEAT car simulation
  • Supercapacitor RC vehicle
  • Quick-Chat.ca
  • G BIKES
  • SigmaCoders.ca
  • Medicine dispenser
  • The Door Stop
  • Emergency Shelter
  • WoLife, GunnHacks 7.0
Ch. 04 · Awards

Silverware

mostly from high school

Ch. 05 · Research

Late night reading

yes, one of them is about em dashes
  1. Local Open-Weight Language Models on Consumer Computers read it → paper · Aug 2026
  2. Why Large Language Models Seem to Overuse Em-Dashes read it → review · Jul 2026
  3. Cost-Aware Language Adaptation in Large Language Models read it → manuscript · Jul 2026
Ch. 06 · Contact

Open channel

write to me.

It's --:-- in Waterloo right now. Building something with hardware, AI or both? I'm always up for a good problem.