# Aakash Mahalingam

![Aakash Mahalingam](/resources/cognition/portraits/aakash-mahalingam.webp)

Cofounder & CEO of Canary (YC W26); ex-Windsurf/Cognition engineer  
Canary (YC W26)  
San Francisco Bay Area

## At Cognition

- Role: Former Engineer (Engineering)
- Joined: Jan 2025
- How they joined: With Windsurf (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/acquisitions/windsurf)
- Before Windsurf: Software Engineer Intern, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
- Now: Canary (YC W26) (https://www.linkedin.com/in/aakashmahalingam)
- Overlapped before Cognition with other Cognition people at: Codeium (Windsurf); Amazon (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/worked-together)

## Identity
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aakashmahalingam
- X: @Aakash_Mahali
- GitHub: https://github.com/akuten1298
- Domain: runcanary.ai

## Notes
- Described his Windsurf/Cognition work verbatim: "I was building AI coding tools at Windsurf for Fortune 10 companies. Great team, great product. But I kept watching the same problem play out: teams shipping faster and breaking more things. No one was solving it." The Canary thesis is a direct reaction to what he saw inside the AI-IDE boom. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/aakashmahalingam_canary-ycombinator-sf-activity-7436864984720076800-LIRX)
- At Windsurf he worked on the enterprise product (the Applied AI tooling that wraps foundation models for Fortune-scale deployment) and watched the self-serve enterprise plan climb toward roughly $20M ARR in about six months, per a 2026 profile. (https://yespress.io/aakash-mahalingam)
- Thanked YC partners Jon Xu and Boris Jabes for guidance, and Afore Capital, Jack McClelland and Anamitra Banerji for support "from Day 0". (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/aakashmahalingam_canary-ycombinator-sf-activity-7436864984720076800-LIRX)
- Windsurf (formerly Codeium) was acquired by Cognition in July 2025 after Google hired its CEO; Cognition said the Windsurf team would continue operating as before, which is how his Jan 2025-Mar 2026 Windsurf tenure became Cognition employment ('x-Cognition'). (https://cognition.com/blog/windsurf)
- YC founder page lists him as CEO of Canary, W26, team size 2, San Francisco, primary partner Jon Xu. (https://www.ycombinator.com/founders/1465952-aakash-mahalingam)
- Cofounder Viswesh N G is Canary's CTO and, per a market map, is ex-Google, ex-Windsurf and ex-Cognition, so the pair carried over directly from the Windsurf/Cognition team. (https://www.respan.ai/market-map/canary)
- Spoke at a Drata event about adversaries and an "agentic second author" for verification of coding agents, and opened Canary's new early beta. (https://x.com/Aakash_Mahali/status/2101056235315568759)
- On the Fondo pod he described Canary reading source code, mapping changes to user flows, spinning up remote browsers and dropping video recordings into the PR, cutting QA from days to about 15 minutes. (https://fondo.com/blog/start-pod-aakash-mahalingam)
- Shared Canary's QA Bench v0, a benchmark for how well AI handles QA, on LinkedIn. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/aakashmahalingam_canary-built-qa-bench-v0-to-measure-how-well-activity-7437918724655046657-LvJ8)
- First author of 'SKETCH: Structured Knowledge Enhanced Text Comprehension for Holistic Retrieval' (arXiv 2412.15443) with Vinesh Kumar Gande, Aman Chadha, Vinija Jain and Divya Chaudhary of Northeastern. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.15443)
- Before Windsurf he built 'Aladdin', billed as the world's first real-time sales copilot with live transcripts as dialogue cards, launched on X in March 2024, an earlier attempt at founding a company. (https://x.com/Aakash_Mahali/status/1770922361744990554)
- Described as an ICPC APAC finalist; his LinkedIn lists ACM ICPC Kolkata-Kanpur Regionals (Dec 2018) during his SASTRA BTech. (https://www.respan.ai/market-map/canary)
- Public headline says "CEO at Canary (YC) | x-Cognition". (https://www.linkedin.com/in/aakashmahalingam)
- Tweeted "You either die or live long enough to build an autonomous AI software engineer.", a nod to his Devin/Cognition past. (https://x.com/Aakash_Mahali/status/2101604970315530549)
- While at Windsurf he amplified Windsurf Wave 3 (MCP integration), Wave 4 (MCP UI improvements) and Wave 5 launches. (https://x.com/Aakash_Mahali/status/1890228376516063280)
- Co-author on 'Northeastern Uni at Multilingual Counterspeech Generation' (arXiv 2412.15453, COLING 2025 workshop) with Sahil Wadhwa, Akankshya Kar and Divya Chaudhary, an LLM alignment/DPO paper from his Northeastern lab work. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.15453)
- His Google Scholar profile shows a verified codeium.com email. (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=KrcRwbwAAAAJ&hl=en)
- Posted views on model alignment and incentive misalignment, arguing misaligned incidents were inevitable and newer attack vectors will become the norm. (https://x.com/Aakash_Mahali/status/2099335150039621928)
- GitHub akuten1298 shows Northeastern CS6650 distributed-systems projects (BSDS servers/clients in Java, 2023) and a fork of CZI's napari image viewer from his 2023 CZI internship; his recent forks include pocketbase, dub, excalidraw and openclaw. (https://github.com/akuten1298)
- At SASTRA's Protocol 2k16 contest he placed 9th in Code-a-thon Jr with teammate Raatan V. S. (team score 38.00), his earliest traceable competitive-programming result. (https://www.sastra.edu/protocol/leaderBoard.php)
- Previous roles include Software Engineer at Windsurf; Software Engineer Intern at Chan Zuckerberg Initiative; Software Engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS); Technology Associate at Morgan Stanley; Technology Analyst at Morgan Stanley; Technology Analyst Intern at Morgan Stanley; Software Engineer Intern at Freshworks. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/aakashmahalingam)
- Recognized at a PostHog / Fondo moment with David J (@davj), posting "Mom I made it." (https://x.com/Aakash_Mahali/status/2055074565433528379)
- Location is San Francisco Bay Area. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/aakashmahalingam)

## Experience
- Cofounder and CEO at Canary (YC W26) (Mar 2026 - Present)
- Software Engineer at Windsurf (Jan 2025 - Mar 2026)
- Software Engineer Intern at Chan Zuckerberg Initiative - California, United States (May 2023 - Aug 2023)
- Software Engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS) (May 2021 - Jun 2022)
- Technology Associate at Morgan Stanley (Jan 2021 - May 2021)
- Technology Analyst at Morgan Stanley (Aug 2020 - Jan 2021)
- Technology Analyst Intern at Morgan Stanley (Jan 2020 - Jul 2020)
- Software Engineer Intern at Freshworks (Nov 2018 - Dec 2018)

## Education
- Y Combinator
- Northeastern University - Master of Science - MS, Computer Science - (Jan 2022 - Jan 2024)
- Masters' Union - Product Management - (Jan 2022 - Jan 2022)
- Shanmugha Arts, Science, Technology and Research Academy - Bachelor of Technology - BTech, Computer Science - (Jan 2016 - Jan 2020)

## Sources
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/aakashmahalingam
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/aakashmahalingam_canary-ycombinator-sf-activity-7436864984720076800-LIRX
- https://yespress.io/aakash-mahalingam
- https://cognition.com/blog/windsurf
- https://www.respan.ai/market-map/canary
- https://github.com/akuten1298
- https://x.com/Aakash_Mahali
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/aakashmahalingam_canary-built-qa-bench-v0-to-measure-how-well-activity-7437918724655046657-LvJ8
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.15453
- https://www.ycombinator.com/founders/3186931-viswesh-n-g
- https://www.ycombinator.com/founders/1465952-aakash-mahalingam
- https://www.sastra.edu/protocol/leaderBoard.php
- https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=KrcRwbwAAAAJ&hl=en
- https://fondo.com/blog/start-pod-aakash-mahalingam
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.15443
- https://api.github.com/users/akuten1298/repos?per_page=100&sort=updated
- https://x.com/Aakash_Mahali/status/2101056235315568759
- https://x.com/Aakash_Mahali/status/1770922361744990554
- https://x.com/Aakash_Mahali/status/2101604970315530549
- https://x.com/Aakash_Mahali/status/1890228376516063280
- https://x.com/Aakash_Mahali/status/2099335150039621928
- https://x.com/Aakash_Mahali/status/2055074565433528379


Researched with Autumn (https://www.autumn.ai) from public sources. Updated 2026-11-04. Profile: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/people/aakash-mahalingam · Everyone at Cognition: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/people