Akshay Chalana

Akshay Chalana is the Co-Founder and CEO of Saphira AI, an artificial intelligence startup focused on automating safety and systems engineering workflows. Before launching Saphira AI, he built a technical foundation across several high-stakes engineering environments, including hardware safety and machine learning infrastructure. At Apple, Chalana managed petabyte-scale datasets to support the development of Siri and the Vision Pro headset, while his tenure at Citadel involved configuring real-time trading workflows. His earlier engineering experience includes developing battery thermal safety systems for extreme heat conditions at Tesla and working on PyTorch and ONNX frameworks at Meta. Additionally, he contributed to pod development and crash testing initiatives for Hyperloop. Chalana's career centers on the intersection of artificial intelligence, data infrastructure, and high-reliability systems engineering for autonomous and critical hardware applications.