My name is Aashril Shazar and I am the founder of Akshara.
Before this, I was the first hire at Keye, a Y Combinator-backed startup building AI for private-equity due diligence. I spent the past year helping enterprises understand what artificial intelligence can and cannot do with their data.
The idea for Akshara came from a simple observation: artificial intelligence is trained almost exclusively on text drawn from the internet, yet the internet represents only a fraction of what humanity has written.
The rest (centuries of records, research, and scholarship) resides in archives, much of it deteriorating, most of it unindexed. The institutions that have preserved this knowledge for generations remain absent from the conversation entirely.
I started Akshara to change both of those things: to bring what has been held in archives for centuries into the era that needs it most, and to ensure the custodians of that knowledge are partners in what comes next.
I studied Political Science and Philosophy at San José State University. I turned down law school to pursue this. Some problems cannot wait.