Nader Khalil

Nader Khalil co-founded and led Brev.dev, a developer tool for accessing GPUs and deploying software on them. NVIDIA acquired Brev in July 2024. At NVIDIA, Khalil works on Brev and developer tools, with an emphasis on making GPU computing accessible to a wider developer audience.[3][1]

Khalil’s GPU selector design began with the words users actually used. In his March 2026 interview, he recalled customers asking for an A100, while cloud provisioning interfaces buried that name behind forms and unfamiliar instance codes. His response was to make recognizable GPU models the dominant visual element: “what if the biggest piece of text was what the user’s asking for?” He designed the chip artwork in Figma, then implemented its apparent animation by using JavaScript to change the underlying SVG styles and code, with slow transitions between states.[1]

Khalil and Nirmal Kumar Juluru co-authored a July 1, 2024 NVIDIA tutorial explaining one-click deployment from the NVIDIA NGC catalog. The workflow combined cloud orchestration and a simple interface with compute provisioning, software setup and SSH-key management. Brev’s open-source Verb tool handled CUDA and Python installation and dependency issues; its CLI managed connections without requiring users to handle IP addresses or PEM files. The authors reported reducing a manual deployment process that often took hours to 2–3 minutes, a claim about deployment setup rather than model-training time.[5]

Their concrete example used NVIDIA NeMo to fine-tune Mistral 7B on PubMedQA. It walked through converting the base model to .nemo format, preparing question-and-context prompts, training with LoRA and parameter-efficient fine-tuning, and evaluating against test data. The tutorial connected easier infrastructure setup to a complete model-customization workflow.[5]

Khalil described the acquisition as giving his team more resources to pursue its existing goals: easier GPU access and Launchables, one-click deployments of software on a GPU. He regarded the alignment between Brev’s product and NVIDIA’s developer focus as central to the acquisition’s fit. He also argued that AI was bringing new audiences into programming, requiring developer interfaces to accommodate people with very different levels of technical experience.[1]

His recollection of early DGX Spark discussions illustrates that priority. After hearing a proposal that a buyer’s first step would be to connect two machines and run Kubernetes, Khalil advocated starting with easy SSH access. A user who simply wanted to run an application needed an effortless connection first. He described NVIDIA Sync as simplifying that connection and Brev’s CLI as wrapping SSH to make access easier.[1]

In March 2026, Khalil described early-access support for registering a home DGX Spark with Brev, allowing its owner to access it remotely like a cloud node. The CES demonstration preceded further networking and security work. He used that release to explain NVIDIA’s “speed of light,” or SOL, practice: establish the theoretical minimum needed to make progress, then add practical constraints. Stability belonged in that calculation; as he put it, “SOL isn’t just like, build everything and let it break”.[1]

Khalil advocates CLI support for developer tools and business applications. He argues that coding agents benefit from terminal access because they can use installed tools, compile code, fix errors and run tests within the same environment. In March 2026, he described Alec’s ongoing rewrite of the Brev CLI, intended to let users and agents browse available compute, provision GPUs and pipe commands together. He also favored CLI wrappers that decide network calls ahead of time, rather than leaving an agent to generate arbitrary API-calling code.[1]

Khalil’s own adoption extended beyond programming. He recalled using an Outlook CLI written by an NVIDIA colleague named Carlos with Codex to summarize his email, flag escalations, collect threads needing a response and archive the rest. He then shared the setup with colleagues and helped them get started, while bringing security into the discussion.[1]

His stated security heuristic was to restrict combinations of file access, internet access and custom-code execution: “you literally only let an agent do two of those three things.” He presented this as a way to think about permissions and enforcement points while enabling adoption. Separately, he reported guidance to run OpenClaw on an isolated Brev cloud VM outside NVIDIA’s corporate network while secure operation was being worked out.[1]

Before Brev’s GPU focus, Khalil worked on cloud infrastructure at Workday after studying Computer Engineering at UC Santa Barbara. He subsequently founded Paneau with Alec Fong; the company joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 batch and placed advertising tablets inside Uber and Lyft vehicles. Frederick Daso’s January 2021 profile connected Paneau’s pandemic disruption and Khalil’s frustration with infrastructure work to the emergence of Brev.[4][6][7]

That early Brev was a backend developer environment intended to abstract databases, deployment, hosting and scaling. Daso reported that Khalil’s experience of Workday’s integrated development environment supplied context for the idea: while building Paneau, Khalil wanted to deliver customer features rather than spend his time solving hosting and infrastructure problems.[7]

In the 2021 interview, Khalil described validating a rough prototype, building an MVP in two weeks, and alternating small onboarding sessions with implementation work. The team would watch two people use Brev, gather feedback and return to their keyboards for several days. He called this “Building just enough,” explaining that the small team’s limited capacity forced it to build only what was necessary.[7]

Khalil credits collaborators with helping shape Brev’s public voice. He recalled swyx coaching him on an early developer blog post after he had stripped out its personality to avoid sounding salesy. Evan Conrad encouraged the founders to embrace being a small team rather than pretend to be a larger company. Khalil associated that advice with Brev’s shaka logo and its GTC booth, where surfboards and palm trees helped draw attention to a corner location. His then-fiancée helped apply the surfboard lettering late the night before the event.[1]