Aashni Joshi

Data Science + Astrophysics @ UC Berkeley. I like building things I'm curious about, studying the universe, and learning from the people I meet along the way.

Currently: Founding Data Engineer at Hyperspell (YC F25).

Aashni Joshi

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Work

/ Where I've been

  1. Founding Data Engineer, Hyperspell (YC F25)

    Aug 2024 to Present · Employee #1

    Employee #1 at Hyperspell, a YC F25 AI infrastructure startup building context and memory for AI agents. Backed by Pioneer Fund, Afore, and a16z Speedrun. Worked across engineering and product, focusing on MCP and memory graphs for AI agents.

  2. Technical Project Manager, NASA Ames Research Center

    Aug 2024 to May 2025

    Led a 6-person Berkeley team on an ISAM feasibility study for NASA's in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing roadmap. Modeled the economics of hybrid Earth and in-orbit satellite manufacturing.

  3. Jan 2024 to May 2024

    Built a RAG pipeline over dense semiconductor research literature so the lab could pull answers out of 100+ papers without losing traceability. Spent most of my time on chunking strategy and grounding, not on the model.

  4. AI Engineer Intern, People+AI

    May 2024 to Aug 2024

    Built DigiForm, an OCR and LLM pipeline that digitized handwritten Indian college applications. Also prototyped lesson planning tools for teachers in low-bandwidth schools.

  5. Data Science Intern, Vast Space

    Aug 2022 to May 2023

    Analyzed the LEO economy to surface academic payload opportunities for Haven-1. Built the revenue and ROI models that went into the business development deck.

Projects

/ Things I got curious about and built

Medicare plan data freshness monitor

What happens when the data under a plan recommender goes stale

Got curious about what actually sits under the hood of Medicare plan recommenders after reading the recent CMS RFI on AI in plan selection.

Got curious about what actually sits under the hood of Medicare plan recommenders after reading the recent CMS RFI on AI in plan selection. Pulled three months of CPSC files (contracts and enrollment, around 10 million rows total) and dug into them for staleness, masking, churn, and coverage gaps. 94.6% of enrollment rows turn out to be masked for privacy, thousands of rows have orphaned geography, and month-over-month contract churn is higher than you'd want for a live recommendation engine. Packaged the analysis as a notebook and a dashboard.

Python · pandas · Jupyter · Next.js · Vercel

KAI, an evaluation framework for AI-assisted reading comprehension

Rubric-based scoring for students with IDD

Stumbled onto the Stanford HAI group working on KAI, an AI tool that helps students with intellectual and developmental disabilities work through reading comprehension.

Stumbled onto the Stanford HAI group working on KAI, an AI tool that helps students with intellectual and developmental disabilities work through reading comprehension. Went deep into the Lemons group's papers on presumed competence and curriculum-based measurement, then tried to answer a question the research itself raises: how do you scale rubric-based scoring as the tool moves from one RCT to three concurrent pilots? Built a four-dimension rubric grounded in their published work, wrote an evaluator that refuses to penalize non-standard grammar (which is the whole philosophical point), and ran it against six worked examples including a critical test case on non-standard communication.

Python · Anthropic API · Jupyter · Next.js · Vercel

Memorang Mini, an LLM eval harness for EdTech

Quality control for AI in the classroom

I've always cared about EdTech, and something that keeps bugging me is that most EdTech companies shipping AI features don't have a real way to tell if the AI is right.

I've always cared about EdTech, and something that keeps bugging me is that most EdTech companies shipping AI features don't have a real way to tell if the AI is right. Vibes-based evaluation is a liability when a student is on the other end. Built a lightweight eval harness with three tabs (Datasets, Graders, Experiments) where you define rubrics, run them across test cases, and get structured pass/fail results with reasoning. Claude does the grading server-side with typed outputs, so AI quality stops being intuited and starts being measurable.

Next.js · TypeScript · Zustand · shadcn/ui · Vercel AI SDK · Anthropic API · Zod

Orbit, GTM intelligence in one API call

A go-to-market engineer, condensed into a single Claude call

Watched too many technical founders duct-tape five tools together just to enrich a company, score it against their ICP, find a champion, and draft outbound.

Watched too many technical founders duct-tape five tools together just to enrich a company, score it against their ICP, find a champion, and draft outbound. Wanted to see how much of that loop could collapse into a single API call. Built Orbit: paste a company name, and in under 10 seconds Claude enriches the account, scores it against a target ICP, surfaces buy signals, infers a champion persona, and drafts a personalized three-touch outbound sequence. One structured call, typed JSON, zero chaining. The data layer is stubbed behind Claude inference on purpose, so swapping in real B2B data APIs later is a clean replacement.

Next.js · TypeScript · Claude Sonnet API · Tailwind · Vercel

Kessler OS, a space debris cascade simulator

Modeling the moment low Earth orbit becomes unusable

Built this at CalHacks because Kessler syndrome is the most visceral version of a problem I actually want to work on.

Built this at CalHacks because Kessler syndrome is the most visceral version of a problem I actually want to work on. The idea is simple and terrifying: one collision in LEO spawns debris, that debris causes more collisions, and the cascade runs until the orbit is unusable for generations. Wanted to see that threshold firsthand. Built an n-body orbital dynamics simulator using RK4 numerical integration and Monte Carlo methods, validated trajectories against NASA/JPL ephemeris data at around 90% accuracy. Watching the cascade run in real time changes how you think about who gets to put stuff in orbit.

Python · NumPy · Monte Carlo simulation · physics modeling · Next.js frontend

Beyond
work

Currently reading: The Art of Spending Money by Morgan Housel

Outside of work

I enjoy:

  • Carefully curating Spotify playlists
  • Stand up comedy
  • Indian pop culture
  • Reading Substack articles
  • Playing my guitar
  • Long walks that end at a cafe
  • Quality time with the people I love

Always down for a coffee!

Whether you're looking for a collaborator, have an interesting problem to solve, or just want to say hi, feel free to reach out :)