hey, i am riza.

i'm a founder, developer, and high school student.

i wrote my first line of code at 9 through minecraft plugins. since then, the loop has stayed simple: build fast, learn in public, stay around sharper people, and keep raising the bar.

what i've been up to:

currently working on flysoar.ai as an eng, building its iOS app with henry langmack (founder of cal ai) and alex slater
placed 3rd out of 4,500+ participants at the openai codex hackathon, and won 8 of the 10 hackathons i participated in overall
built a computer vision coin-sorting pipeline for the government of kerala when i was 14
selected as a top100coders fellow from 5,000+ applicants, finished in the top 15, and received a personal award from the CM of kerala through KSUM
placed 1st at digital fest in all 4 years i participated, then placed 1st nationally and 2nd internationally in the uae, top 0.08% of 2,500+ participants, with the kerala-to-dubai trip fully sponsored
selected for founders, inc. canopy s26
attended yc startup school, met yc partners jared friedman and jon xu over dinner, and pitched my startup to them
selected to attend yc startup school paris in june 2026
qualified for stage 2 of the international olympiad in ai (INAIO)
placed 1st regionally at the CBSE national science exhibition 2024 in computational thinking and represented kerala nationally in the category
started my school's coding and robotics club and taught 400+ students
invited to interview with entrepreneur first india and z fellows
reached the toastmasters international finals
founded zerograd, a 500+ builder community where people level up by shipping code; members later won gold and silver medals in IOI and IOAI
received an official ministerial commendation from the government of kerala
keynoted IRCC at 14 alongside nambi narayanan (ex-ISRO)
got a yc s26 interview after building a first MVP right before the application deadline

press from when i was 14:

before software took over completely, i was deep into football, building small games, shipping discord bots, selling little projects, and somehow turning parts of that into money. these days, most of my energy goes into computer vision, edge ai, embedded systems, and agentic interfaces.

building something ambitious? for serious conversations, reach me through codewithriza@gmail.com. for casual chats, dm me on @rizawastaken, @rizawastaken, or codewithriza.