Sourya Kakarla
Co-Founder & CTO at Zone
Palo Alto, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolSourya Kakarla is a founder and AI-focused CTO with 12 years of experience building production ML and consumer AI products from startup prototypes to scale. He blends academic research in speech/NLP and cryptography with hands-on engineering—leading LLM-based conversational agents at SkyLink, co-founding voice-first services that generated six-figure revenue, and now founding Zone to push consumer AI into new territory. A Columbia MS graduate and former PhD researcher, he has taught speech recognition and NLP courses while contributing to applied cryptanalysis and cybersecurity collaborations. Based in Palo Alto, he pairs deep technical rigor (Azure Service Fabric, Python, C#/.NET, AWS) with product instincts and an active maker streak—his GitHub reflects projects like trymyzone.com that bridge experiments to consumer-facing demos.
12 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD (Dropout) Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD (Dropout) Computer Science at Indian Institute of Technology KharagpurMaster of Science - MS Computer Science, Master of Science - MS Computer Science at Columbia University
Github Skills (78)
speech10
shell10
cuda10
speech-to-text10
speaker-verification10
kaldi10
asr10
python9
deep-learning9
tiling9
speech-recognition9
science8
linux8
python-bindings8
i38
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
ma08/chrome-link-copy
Aug 2014 - Feb 2016
Contributions:52 commits, 1 push in 1 year 6 months
ma08/codex_optimal_proj
Mar 2022 - Apr 2022
Project done by Group 13 (Gabriele Tombesi, Derek Phamle, Sourya Kakarla) for Deep Learning Spring 2022 course at Columbia.
Contributions:130 commits, 88 pushes in 1 month
deep-learning
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