Hello! I’m Akshay.

I am on a mission to support people to nourish themselves and each other in a way that reconnects us to our creativity, our community and our planet.

I’m currently doing this through Food Jazz, where I teach people to cook intuitively, without recipes. Before that, I founded Foodnome, helped pass California’s home cooking law, and spent the years in between helping other founders raise money.

At other times, you can find me farming, open fire cooking, mushroom foraging, rock climbing, throwing clay, playing jazz saxophone, building things, and watercolor painting to name a few. I try to never stop learning!

In a previous life, I earned a Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience from UC Davis and spent time building computer systems doing computational neuroscience research on awake brain surgery patients.

I didn’t make it here alone. I owe everything to my dear family and community who have supported me throughout my life. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

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The Next Thing You Eat with David Chang on Hulu

Hulu · The Next Thing You Eat · with David Chang

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2017 — 2024 · Founder & CEO

Foodnome

Founder and CEO of Foodnome, the first online marketplace for home cooked food from permitted home restaurants. Empowering food entrepreneurship, building community, and redefining our relationship to our food.

We raised over $3M from top-tier investors, onboarded 250+ home cooks, served 50,000+ users, and built the national campaign that helped pass California’s AB-626 and similar legislation in Utah. Foodnome was featured in the New York Times, NPR, KQED, CBS, ABC7, Eater LA, and a dinner with David Chang on Hulu, and was cited as a case study in Catherine Bracy’s World Eaters (Penguin Random House, 2025).

I handed the keys to COOK Alliance in 2024 to keep the policy work moving in good hands.

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2025 — 2026 · Co-founder

Avid Health

I co-founded Avid Health to bring AI into home healthcare. It was the one industry where my two backgrounds overlapped: years of building community with home cooks, most of them mid-40s people of color, and years before that working with nurses and clinicians in the neuroscience clinic.

We started as an AI SaaS product, using robotic process automation to handle the work that fills an agency’s day: intake, billing, scheduling, and charting. I worked hand in hand with our design partners to get the product live in small and mid-sized agencies, and we raised eight figures to fund the work.

Working that closely with agency owners, we kept hearing the same thing. Owners were aging out, and most planned to sell within the next fifteen years. So we pivoted from selling agencies software to buying the agencies themselves, and Avid grew into an AI roll-up.

Akshay speaking at the Food Funded conference

2023 — 2026 · Advisor, Investor Relations, Founder in Residence

Advisory & Fundraising

Across the years between Foodnome and Food Jazz, I spent a lot of my time helping other founders raise money. I started by advising early-stage solar startups at Dendrite Consulting, then took on Head of Investor Relations at Halo Hydration, an emerging CPG brand, where I connected them with strategic partners and helped tell their story to investors. The 50+ person cap table I’d managed at Foodnome made the IR side feel familiar.

Most recently I joined Wefunder as Founder in Residence, hosting dinners with crazy interesting and ambitious people, helping them raise millions of dollars for their dreams, and getting deep on vibe coding before it was cool. Wefunder brought together so many things I love: fundraising, community, and fancy mansion dinner parties.

These days I help a few founders at a time put their rounds together. If you’re raising, I’d love to hear what you’re building.

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2014 — 2018 · Researcher

Neuroscience

I graduated from UC Davis in 2015 with a Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience. As an undergrad I worked as a project lead at the Center for Neuroscience (Sutter Lab), where we studied how the brain analyzes sound and how attention shapes that neural analysis. I spent time in the primate lab and got my hands on real intracranial recordings.

After graduating, I joined neurosurgeon Dr. Fady Girgis in the operating room, designing and running computational neuroscience experiments with awake brain surgery patients. I built real-time systems that ran experiments on screen, tracked eye movements, and recorded neuronal spike activity in the STN. I got deep on EEG analysis, spike sorting, applied machine learning for neural data, and IRB patient consenting. I’m co-author on a peer-reviewed paper in Frontiers in Neuroscience.

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2024 — Present · Founder

Food Jazz

Cooking has been a part of my life since I was a child. For me food is symbolic of love when words are inadequate. Memories are created over the warmth and aroma of a homemade meal.

After hosting hundreds of pop up dinners, staging at restaurants, and helping hundreds of people get their own culinary dreams off the ground, I developed my own nontraditional cooking methodology: Food Jazz. I now teach busy professionals how to cook intuitively, without recipes, through a 30-day intensive that meets them in their own kitchen.

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Akshay riding the Davis PartyBike with a full crew

2012 — Present · Bikes

Bicycles

In college, I spent some years as the student manager of the campus bike shop. The Bike Barn is the busiest shop in the nation, handling over 10,000 bikes a year. I learned invaluable mechanical problem solving and realtime customer service skills.

More recently I served as Director of Strategic Growth at LuckeepBike, where I pitched and developed a USA expansion plan to bring affordable Class 2 moped-style e-bikes to college towns and food delivery markets. The 2025 tariffs on China killed those plans overnight, but the love of bikes hasn’t gone anywhere.

I’m currently working on a 10-seater pedal-powered bike bus campus tours business serving prospective UC Davis students and families.

PartyBike

2010 — Present · Climbing

Climbing

I picked up rock climbing in high school as a cross-training exercise between pole vault seasons. Though I didn’t make the cut for collegiate vaulting, my passion for climbing stuck.

I climbed competitively and was a founding member and vice president of the UC Davis climbing team. After working for years as a route setter at a climbing gym, I transitioned my hobby into an economic stream. I now work seasonally as a pinecone harvester and a large tree pruning arborist. It’s a gym membership that pays you!

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Principles

Under Promise,
Over Deliver

I strive to set achievable goals, work hard and build trust through consistency.

Radical Empathy

I can never know what’s best for someone other than myself. I try to listen attentively and only give feedback when asked. All humans have gifts to share with the world. We just have to remember to see them.

Always Keep
Moving

The only constant is change. I try to always stay in motion of body, mind and spirit. Learning new things and constantly challenging myself gives life purpose.

Loyal to
the Soil

We are human animals. We are part of nature. I’m an agrarian above anything else. How can I be good compost for future generations?

Staying Playful

Life is but a dream. A fleeting moment in the universe. I believe we are not meant to take it too seriously. We are all children at heart. Be romantic whenever you can. Do things that leave a question mark in your heart and the heart of others.