Ayush's idea of a weekend is a 36-hour hackathon. He’s competed in more than 60 of them — and won over half.

At Dryft, he is a Founding Software Engineer, working on some of the hardest technical problems behind the product, from context retrieval to the systems that model and automate complex decisions.

Before joining Dryft, Ayush studied Software Engineering at the University of Waterloo before dropping out to start Hyperic, a deep-tech company developing action models for autonomous flight in GPS-denied environments. The company was backed by Pear VC. Before that, he worked across AI, data infrastructure, and applied research — including EEG systems, large-scale data pipelines, and human-computer interaction research at the University of Toronto.

Building things has been a constant throughout his life. Beyond winning more than 30 hackathons, he led Canada’s largest high school hackathon and organized competitions ranging from traditional software challenges to teams racing to train an AI to play chess.

Outside of work, he’s into cars and tends to spend his free time hacking on ambitious — and occasionally completely random — projects.