The lab has
one scientist.

Athavan Thambimuthu is an engineer in Montréal who deploys AI systems in production for a living — agents, workflows, the plumbing that makes a model useful instead of impressive. Lanvar is what happens after hours: the ideas too fun to leave in a notebook get built, shipped to a subdomain, and set loose.

The building started early. At fifteen he spent two years teaching himself Arduino to build Green Switch, an energy-saving lighting system that carried him to the Intel International Science & Engineering Fair as a 2018 finalist. Then came the hackathon years — eleven-plus of them, six-plus wins, a People’s Choice here, a Best Health Hack there, a first place in stem-cell classification at the same PharmaHacks that lit the machine-learning fuse a year earlier.

Along the way he co-founded CHAP, a McGill hackathon club that grew to 35 members across four faculties, and took first place at the McGill Engine Centre pitch competition with Flashify — the rare hackathon build that survived the weekend. The throughline: build the thing, ship the thing, and bring people along for it.

The rules of the lab

• Everything ships. A demo that only works on my machine doesn’t count.
• Fun first. If it stops being fun, it gets the retired stamp, not life support.
• Learn out loud. The wins and the faceplants both go on the shelf.
• The toys are not the point. Here’s what they’re for.

The receipts

• Intel ISEF 2018 finalist — Embedded Systems, at fifteen.
• 11+ hackathons, 6+ wins — health, education, neural decoding, and more.
• 2nd place, Yale × Yale-NUS Global Policy Hackathon — proof it’s not only software.
• 1st place, McGill Engine Centre pitch competition · CHAP co-founder.

Say hi

For consulting, start at hire the lab. For everything else — ideas, questions, or just to talk shop — the inbox is open.