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.