Hi, I’m Sourya Kakarla

I’m an AI/ML engineer and founder building holistic consumer experiences. As Co-founder of Zone, I’m reimagining how messaging platforms can automatically understand context and complete tasks for you, going beyond simple to-do lists to actually getting work done.

Life has made me go through quite a number of twists and turns that took me from big tech to dropping out of PhD to finally finding my grove at startups. Designing agent orchestration and eval systems for real world agents that can go beyond cool demos. I have a research background in Speech&NLP and InfoSec. Alum of IIT Kharagpur and Columbia University.

After leading the AI/ML team at Skylink (YC W22) where we built a slack agent for corporate travel bookings for McKinsey, I’m now focused on bringing ambient agentic experience to consumer messaging :)

You can view my full resume here.

Founding Journey

Zone Text

Zone is an AI-native messaging platform that solves the problem of actionable items getting lost in long chats. Unlike WhatsApp or iMessage, Zone embeds ambient intelligence to proactively handle reminders, take notes, segment lists, schedule meetings, and more understanding context and taking the right actions like a skilled executive assistant would. Messaging reimagined for the AGI era.

Visit us at trymyzone.com

The Journey from Ladduu AI to Zone

We started with Ladduu AI, focused on helping seniors and their families through:

  • Multilingual voice and chat assistants for navigating digital services
  • WhatsApp assistant supporting 8+ Indian languages (reached 5,000+ users)
  • iOS voice assistant for essential services

Through this journey, we discovered something profound: the real value wasn’t just in helping individuals complete tasks, but in enhancing human-to-human communication. This insight led us to pivot to Zone - bringing ambient AI agents to everyone’s messaging experience, where tasks are understood and executed automatically while you focus on what matters: connecting with people.

Work Experience

Joined as Founding ML Engineer and led the ML team at SkyLink. Designed and built agent orchestration and evals systems.

Microsoft

Working as Software Engineer in bigtech successfully instilled a deep existential crisis and triggered a depression arch that guided me towards research and startups.

Research Interests

  • Large Language Models (LLMs) and Agentic AI
  • Multilingual Natural Language Processing
  • Voice Assistants and Speech Recognition
  • Accessibility and Robotics
  • Cryptography & Information Security

I published papers in reputable conferences and journals, focusing on applied NLP and cryptanalysis. My work has been recognized with awards such as the Best Paper at ASONAM 2016 Conference.

Publications

View my Google Scholar profile for the most up-to-date list of publications.

Journal Articles & Preprints

  1. Looney Tunes: Exposing the Lack of DRM Protection in Indian Music Streaming Services

    • Ahaan Dabholkar, Sourya Kakarla, Dhiman Saha
    • Arxiv Pre-print (In Review)

  2. DINAMITE: Internal Differential Match-in-the-end Attack on 8-round PAEQ

    • Dhiman Saha, Sourya Kakarla, Dipanwita Roy Chowdhury
    • IET Information Security (2019)

  3. Gain: Practical Key-Recovery Attacks on Round-reduced PAEQ

    • Dhiman Saha, Sourya Kakarla, Srinath Mandava, Dipanwita Roy Chowdhury
    • Journal of Hardware and Systems Security (HaSS 2017)

Conference Proceedings

  1. On the practical implementation of impossible differential cryptanalysis on reduced-round AES

    • Sourya Kakarla, Srinath Mandava, Dhiman Saha, Dipanwita Roy Chowdhury
    • International Conference on Applications and Techniques in Information Security (ATIS 2017)

  2. Gain: Practical Key-Recovery Attacks on Round-reduced PAEQ

    • Dhiman Saha, Sourya Kakarla, Srinath Mandava, Dipanwita Roy Chowdhury
    • Security, Privacy, and Applied Cryptography Engineering (SPACE 2016)

  3. Stop clickbait: Detecting and preventing clickbaits in online news media

    • Abhijnan Chakraborty, Bhargavi Paranjape, Sourya Kakarla, Niloy Ganguly
    • Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2016)
    • Best Paper Award

Awards

Musings

Reading

I used to hate nonfiction till I was like 20.

Fiction

Some of my favourite fiction works:

  • ASOIAF
  • HHGTG
  • Stranger in a Strange land
  • Catch 22
  • Jeffrey Archer (guilty pleasure while growing up)
  • (other cliched stuff)

Non-fiction

Then I went into a “seeking” phase where that’s all I read for a few years.

Especially existential/spiritual/religious/mythological books to make sense of the universe/myself.

Some authors/genres/fields:

  • Herman Hesse
  • Richard Dawkins
  • Yuval Noah Harari
  • Camus
  • Buddhism
    • Old Path, White Clouds
    • Two Truths
  • Sanatana Dharma (Hinduism)
    • Advaita/Non-duality
    • Shaivism/Shaktism
    • Karma, Bhakti, Gnyana, Raja Yogas

Once I got the startup bug, I read a few of the typical startup books:

  • The Hard Thing About Hard Things
  • Zero to One
  • Outliers

Currently Reading

Finished The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch - a mind-expanding exploration of explanations and progress.

Currently reading Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson - diving into the story of building magical consumer products that changed the world.

Jotted down some of my reads in goodreads. TODO: Update it.

Music

My music taste has seasons. Some times I listen to eastern devotional songs like:

  • Shiva Tandava Stotram
  • Aigiri Nandini

In other phases, I listen to western classic/soft rock:

  • Pink Floyd
  • Led Zeppelin

East-West fusion in content and style is probably my favourite genre. Example:

  • Shiva Tandava Stotram by Shanti People

Can’t sing for the life of me but write occassionally. Here’s a song I wrote in Telugu - Listen Now.

Writing

Scribbling down my thoughts into “poems” is a favourite cathartic pastime.

Holy Nature - My favorite among all my amateur work got featured in Poets of Columbia.

Soccer

  • Arsenal fan, ‘Gooner/Gunner’ for life!
  • Receiving Gold Medal through MS Hall in IIT KGP General Championship is a highlight of my soccer life.
  • FIFA is pretty much the only video game I ever played consistantly. Always up for a game if time permits.