Akshay Akula's Projects and Hackathons
Under Akshay's house is the portfolio's secret basement: a portal hub whose pads warp to every building in town, with a big screen for his Devpost portfolio: 21 projects across 48 hackathons and 10 achievements.
Selected projects on Devpost
- enel (edge-network environment lattice), winner: turns a drone swarm into a rapid 3D Gaussian splatting digital-twin system for mission planning, simulation and critical operations.
- Vonar.ai, winner: an AI voice agent that answers inbound calls, handles support requests and finds answers with real-time search.
- Reflexx, winner: Atlassian Codegeist 2022 1st place and Best in North America ($36K, 3,500+ contestants); a Jira-native app that feeds compiler context to OpenAI's code model to produce precise bug fixes. Its giant check hangs in the portal hub.
- FoodFyte, winner: builds online communities in food deserts to work together on food access.
- GitGuard: an AI compliance agent for GitLab CI/CD that checks merge requests against SOC 2, HIPAA and PCI-DSS policies.
- Dashwill: turns surplus food into automated donations to homeless shelters from a single photo.
- Myogen: video-to-text reasoning to control bionic hand poses.
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.
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.