Akshay Akula: Hacker in Residence at NQB8, AI Engineer & Founder
Akshay Akula is an AI engineer and founder based in the Washington DC-Baltimore area. His main work is full-time as Hacker in Residence at NQB8, a technical venture studio. He also works on AI and agent strategy at Flex Capital and is the founder and principal engineer of Vonar.ai, an enterprise voice AI company serving government and defense customers. He previously worked as a software engineer at Arkestro and earned a B.S. in Computer Science from Virginia Tech in 2022.
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Experience
Hacker in Residence, NQB8 (June 2026 to present)
Full-time at NQB8, a technical venture studio.
AI Engineer, AI & Agent Strategy, Flex Capital (June 2026 to present)
Working on AI and agent strategy at Flex Capital.
Founder & Principal Engineer, Vonar.ai (March 2025 to present, Washington DC metro area)
- Federal and legislative engagement: delivered live demonstrations of production generative AI voice systems to the GSA, congressional offices and U.S. Navy stakeholders, including a presentation at the U.S. Capitol on how AI can transform services for Congress; advocated for federal adoption of AI-driven maintenance and compliance software; secured letters of support from U.S. Senators and Members of Congress.
- Carahsoft partnership: Vonar.ai partnered with Carahsoft, the government IT solutions provider, so U.S. agencies can buy and deploy its AI voice automation through contract vehicles such as NASA SEWP V and ITES-SW2.
- Federal prime AI adoption (AATD, $300M+ in contract volume): designed, built and deployed a CMMC and compliance generative AI chatbot from requirements through production in a segregated federal environment, owning the full prototype-to-production arc.
- Revenue: passed $100K ARR within the first year through enterprise pilots and SOW engagements with defense and compliance customers.
- Perplexity Sonar Developer Competition: 1st place of 500+ teams and 5,000+ contestants (a $10K first prize); built an instantly provisioned voice agent chaining Perplexity Sonar search through Llama-4 into conversational answers.
- Voice AI platform and integrations: shipped enterprise-grade voice agents for IVR on Twilio with real-time speech-to-text, then retrieval-augmented generation, then ticketing and actions, with connectors for BMC, Jira and ServiceNow; reached 60% call-to-ticket automation and under 600 ms response latency in pilots.
- Network and cloud architecture: built on AWS with deployment into customer VPCs, segregated data silos and on-premise environments; containerized microservices, access controls and audit-friendly logging; horizontally scalable with autoscaling and Redis-backed state for concurrent multi-call loads.
Lead Engineer, Private Technology Consulting (January 2023 to October 2024, remote)
- Security and SOC 2 readiness (e-PlanSoft): migrated to salted password hashing and KMS-managed AES-256, enforced SSO/MFA and RBAC, and stood up audit logging and access reviews; cleared readiness with zero critical findings.
- Built a SeatGeek-integrated MVP for an Atlanta ticket brokerage in 4 weeks, automating inventory sync and cutting manual operations by more than 50%.
- Led 4 junior engineers and hardened a high-growth health-tech startup (UrgentIQ) with error monitoring and end-to-end tests, reducing user-visible errors.
Software Engineer, Arkestro (June 2022 to November 2024, promoted within 1 year, San Francisco, CA)
- Designed and shipped a supplier recommendation engine adopted by Fortune 500 clients including Walmart and Volkswagen.
- Built scalable AWS data-pipeline infrastructure delivering data availability in under 5 minutes, and automated procurement decisions from historical data.
- Two-time internal hackathon winner: milestone prediction in the procurement lifecycle, and recommendation expansion via novel data sources.
Selected projects and awards
- franklin.earth (2026): 1st place DC Regional and 2nd place Nationals at AI EXPO 2026.
- Drone swarm for Gaussian splat software (2026): presented in Washington, DC: a drone swarm paired with Gaussian splat software.
- Exark (2025): 1st place at the DC National Security Hackathon. A heavy-lift VTOL drone for the DARPA LIFT Challenge with AI flight control, a modular airframe and an optimized Gaussian-splatting (3DGS) perception and simulation pipeline.
- Myogen (2025): EMG and IMU bionic-hand control with low-latency adaptive inference for DoD xTechHumanoid tasks.
- Perplexity Sonar voice agent (2025): 1st of 500+ teams in the Perplexity Sonar Developer Competition.
- Reflexx (2022): Atlassian Codegeist 1st place and Best in North America ($36K, 3,500+ contestants). A Jira-native app that feeds compiler context to OpenAI's code-davinci-002 to produce precise bug fixes.
Education
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA: B.S. in Computer Science, 2022. Major League Hacking Top 50 of 150,000+ hackers; VT Hacks, UVA Hacks and VCU Health Hacks winner. President and Co-Founder of the Blockchain Club at Virginia Tech, which grew to a top-5 campus club within one year. Member of the VT Finance Club leadership team and of the Entrepreneurship Club.
Skills
Python, JavaScript, REST APIs, RAG, LoRA, PyTorch, TensorFlow and TF Lite, Node.js, Next.js, SQL, C, Java, AWS, Docker, Redis; network, cloud and on-premise architecture; VPC and segregated-environment deployment.
Frequently asked questions
- Who is Akshay Akula?
- An AI engineer and founder in the Washington DC-Baltimore area. His main work is as Hacker in Residence at NQB8; he is also at Flex Capital, founder of Vonar.ai, formerly a software engineer at Arkestro, and a Virginia Tech computer science graduate.
- Does Akshay Akula work at Flex Capital?
- Yes. Since June 2026 he is an AI Engineer on AI and agent strategy at Flex Capital, alongside his main role at NQB8.
- What is Vonar.ai?
- An enterprise voice AI company founded by Akshay Akula in March 2025. It replaces legacy IVR with 24/7 AI voice support that routes into Jira Service Management, ServiceNow, BMC and Salesforce, and is available to U.S. agencies through Carahsoft.
- What is Akshay Akula building now?
- Hacker in Residence at NQB8 (full-time since June 2026) is his main focus, alongside his work at Flex Capital and Vonar.ai.