Serhat Akar

I'm a builder based in Paris focused on human-computer interaction — how people read, learn, and interact with language through software. I design and ship products that sit at the intersection of cognition, NLP, and mobile interfaces.

My current work on Piksi explores on-device word alignment, contextual embeddings for cross-lingual translation mapping, and how to reduce friction between encountering a word and retaining it. I care about building tools that respect how people actually think and read.

This interest started early. In high school, I designed Hems, a blockchain consensus protocol that replaced proof-of-work mining with solar-powered Raspberry Pi nodes and geography-based reward distribution — years before the energy debate around PoW went mainstream. The same question kept coming back: how do you design systems that work with people, not against them?

Former Entrepreneur in Residence at Antler (<3% acceptance rate), where I explored product ideas in mental health. I've written a novel over two years, do hackathons whenever I can, and sold 1,500+ NFTs on Solana with two friends.