Exark: Heavy-Lift VTOL Drone by Akshay Akula and Team
Exark won 1st place at the 2025 DC National Security Hackathon. It is a heavy-lift VTOL drone built for the DARPA LIFT Challenge, with AI flight control, a modular airframe, and an optimized 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) pipeline for perception and simulation. In the portfolio it lives in the basement lab under Vonar.ai HQ (reached by the stairs or a steel hatch on Career Road), next to the workbench, battery rack and flight test cage. Visitors can fly Exark themselves in a mini game: thread a heavy-lift payload through waypoint gates in the flight test cage.
Related projects
- 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.
About Akshay Akula
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.