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Gayathri Meka

building things that matter

I am deeply committed to creating meaningful, positive impact in people’s lives. My work is centered on one belief: where someone starts in life should not determine what they are able to become.

I built HyperVerge Academy with a passionate team to help young people from under-resourced communities access careers in technology. Through mentorship and structured learning, we support them in building the skills and confidence needed to secure well-paying jobs.

Life has taken me through many chapters and many places, each one shaping how I think and what I care about. The latest chapter brought me to California, along with the most personal milestone yet: becoming a mother in August 2025. That experience has deepened my conviction that expanding opportunity for the next generation is some of the most important work we can do.

Journey

Last updated: March 2026

What I've Built

tools we actually use

I studied computer science but spent most of my career in social impact. Over time, I came to believe that technology alone rarely solves social problems - at best, it amplifies the systems and people already in place.1 So we focused on building those systems at HyperVerge Academy.

AI agents shifted something. Tools like Claude Code made it possible to spin up small, useful pieces of software and iterate quickly - inside the work we were already doing. What started as curiosity became a steady stream of tools I've built for my work, my family, and myself.

SensAI

SensAI started as a hackathon project and grew into the core learning platform for HyperVerge Academy. Inspired by Khanmigo, the idea was simple: what if every learner had access to a mentor who could give honest, personalised feedback - not just a score, but a nudge toward thinking deeper? Admins define courses with questions and rubrics; learners submit in text, code, or audio; the LLM evaluates and gives Socratic feedback. Built with Aman Dalmia.

HVA Pulse

HVA Pulse is the operating system for HyperVerge Academy, the heartbeat of everything we do. It gives the team real-time visibility into every learner's journey so they can focus on the right intervention at the right time, rather than gathering data and building pivot tables. Most recently I added Ask Pulse - a natural language interface that lets the team query program data using LLMs. Instead of building a report, you just ask a question. Pulse started as a lightweight dashboard on Retool - a quick way to get visibility without building from scratch. As our needs grew, Retool’s constraints became limiting. I’m now rebuilding Pulse from scratch using Claude Code, with a much clearer vision of what it needs to be.

100 Tiny Tastes

When I started introducing solids to Nivan, I was tracking everything on a spreadsheet - which foods he’d tried, whether I’d given them three days in a row (to catch any allergies), what was still missing from his diet. It got unwieldy fast. So I built 100 Tiny Tastes: a simple tool to log foods, see it in a calendar view, add custom foods, and share with family. Still the most used thing I’ve built for myself.

Ashiana PG Manager

My mother-in-law was managing her paying guest house entirely on paper: room occupancy, rent payments, monthly collections, all tracked by hand. The only way to see who had paid and what the month looked like was going through her handwritten ledger page by page. I built Ashiana PG Manager to replace it with a simple digital tool. It tracks room occupancy, rent payments, and monthly collections, and flags who needs a follow-up, though to be honest, she already knows exactly who owes her money. But it was special to see her feeling proud of her monthly income.

Get Curious

Get Curious started as Think Again - a tool that generates MCQs to test understanding, where you don’t just pick the right answer but explain your reasoning for the wrong ones too. The questions get progressively harder, pushing you to go deeper rather than just confirm what you already know. Along the way I added a feature to break down a broad topic into subtopics - which turned out to be the more useful thing for how I actually learn. So I renamed it. Get Curious is inspired by Nivan, who approaches everything with a relentlessness I find myself wanting to bring to my own work and life.

Wonder Leaps

Wonder Leaps started with a simple need: I wanted something that would tell me when Nivan was likely going through a growth spurt and what activities I could do with him to support his development. There are great free apps that already solve this, but they all felt like too much. Videos, detailed tracking, endless notifications. As a new parent with a very energetic baby, I didn’t have time for any of that. I wanted something almost like a document - clean, focused, just the essentials, but slightly more interactive. I built it, it solved my problem, and I stopped. No bells and whistles needed. Knowing when to ship and when to step back is a lesson I keep learning.

Except SensAI and HVA Pulse, most of these tools were built quickly, often over a few days or weekends.

1 This idea is explored in Kentaro Toyama’s book Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology.

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