hey, i am riza.
i'm a founder, developer, and computer science student.
i started coding at 9 by making minecraft plugins. i still try to keep the same rhythm: ship quickly, learn in public, and find people who push me.
what i've been up to:
- currently building a product in stealth
- joined
the university of western australia on a full ride - received the full-ride scholarship from maharashtra cm devendra fadnavis at uwa's campus launch
- co-founded astrail at hackerhouse in blr, making apis easier for ai agents to use; we got a
yc s26 interview and made the top 10% for f26 - worked part-time as a software engineer at
soar flights - placed 3rd out of 4,500+ participants at the
openai hackathon, and won 8 of the 10 hackathons i participated in overall - selected for
founders, inc. canopy s26 and built starcy in san francisco alongside other founders - spent some time as a technical founder building
starcy, an ai assistant for the iphone's dynamic island, working on low-latency websockets and ios background behavior - did two years of jee coaching in hyderabad on a scholarship. jee wasn't for me, but the friends and the city made it worth it
- worked as an ai researcher with the government of kerala in 2023, building coin counter, an opencv system to count and sort coins, when i was 14
- selected as a
top100coders fellow in 2023 from 5,000+ applicants, finished in the top 15, and received a personal award from the 
chief minister of kerala through 
KSUM and mu learn - placed 1st at digital fest four years straight, then 1st nationally and 2nd at an international coding competition in ajman, uae, top 0.08% of 2,500+ participants; cybersquare sponsored the trip from kerala to dubai
- one of 50 invited to a private dinner with yc partners jared friedman and jon xu out of 25,000 startup school india applicants; pitched what i was building and met founders from iit bombay, stanford, and harvard, people from top firms, olympiad winners, and a top-30 all-india ranker
- selected to attend yc startup school in paris, san francisco, and bangalore
- qualified for stage 2 of the
indian national olympiad of ai in 2026, working across machine learning, python, and ai problem-solving - placed 1st regionally at the
CBSE national science exhibition 2024 in computational thinking and represented kerala nationally in the category - started and led my school's coding and robotics club from 2020 to 2024, running workshops and mentoring 400+ students
- invited to interview with
entrepreneur first india and 
z fellows - reached the
toastmasters international finals - received an official ministerial commendation from the government of kerala
- keynoted
IRCC at 14 alongside 
nambi narayanan (ex-ISRO)
before software took over completely, i was deep into football, building small games, shipping discord bots, selling little projects, and somehow turning parts of that into money. these days, most of my energy goes into computer vision, edge ai, embedded systems, and agentic interfaces.
want to talk? dm me on discord (@rizawastaken).