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Building practical AI systems & clean products.

I’m Akshay Pillai—applied ML researcher and product-minded builder. I love working at the edge of ML research, experiments, and products — now at Waterloo, exploring reasoning and evaluation.

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Waterloo · Zeta Reason · i-Comp-Data Fellow

Portrait of Akshay Pillai

Selected Work

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Zeta Reason

Open-source benchmarking platform for reasoning in LLMs.

PythonFastAPIPyTorch

VeilFlow

Geo-mobility & satellite analytics for cities and real estate.

GeospatialRastersPython

SignalLake (Relam)

B2B AI for revenue-signal intelligence & contextual analytics.

Next.jsSupabaseStripe

Career

Applied AI Researcher

· Zeta Reason
Waterloo, Canada • Sep 2025 — Present
  • •Built open-source CoT reasoning benchmark; 1,000+ test runs
  • •Piloting 0→5 MVPs with academic AI labs; prepping NeurIPS/EMNLP
1,000+ test runs5 pilot labs

Computational Mathematics — Applied ML Researcher

· University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Canada • Sep 2025 — 2027
  • •Research focus: computational finance and evaluation of LLM reasoning (faithfulness, calibration, robustness).
i-Comp-Data Fellow

Product & Customer Analyst

· Volaris / Aislelabs (TSE: CSU)
Toronto, Canada • Nov 2022 — Apr 2024
  • •$1M+ revenue impact via analytics & product expansion
  • •Churn framework across $6M+ accounts (−0.86% churn)
$1M+ growth$6M portfolio

Consulting Analyst — Product Expansion

· Confidential ($300M org)
Waterloo, Canada • Feb 2022 — Aug 2022
  • •Drove 5 diligences → 1 acquisition; financial modeling & GTM
5 diligences1 acquisition

Data Scientist

· InApp
Palo Alto, USA (Remote) • Jul 2019 — Dec 2021
  • •Scaled analytics systems to millions of requests (COVID peak)
  • •Reusable analytics architecture saving 1,000+ eng. hours/project
Millions req/day1,000+ eng. hrs saved

Co-Founder & Lead Engineer

· Infinity Lab
Kochi, India • Sep 2016 — Mar 2019
  • •IoT/SaaS products backed by Govt. of India, NASSCOM, IIT Delhi, MIT
  • •Raised seed via KSUM; trained 200+ students in product & design
Seed funded200+ students trained

Education

University of Waterloo — Master of Mathematics, Computational Mathematics

2025 — 2027 · Applied ML, reasoning evaluation, scientific computing · i-Comp-Data Fellow

APJ Abdul Kalam Technological University — B.Eng., Electronics & Communication

2015 — 2019 · Christy Memorial Award (1/700) · Hackathon wins (MIT, IITs) · Led university incubator

Get in Touch

Interested in collaborating or want to chat about AI & math?

Would love to chat about AI/Building products/Data experients, Send me a email and lets plan a call.