Akul Gupta is Co-Founder and CTO at MindFort AI (YC X25), an autonomous AI cybersecurity platform building fully autonomous security agents that find, validate, and patch vulnerabilities in web applications at machine speed.

Akul earned his M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he was drawn to AI and security research early in his academic career.

He co-authored academic papers on LLM-enabled cyberattacks and contributed to red-teaming and model safety research at both OpenAI and Anthropic, giving MindFort a deep research-driven foundation.

Prior to MindFort, Akul served as a Graduate Researcher at UIUC, a Model Safety Researcher at Anthropic, and a Red Team Engineer at OpenAI, building rare cross-disciplinary expertise in AI and offensive security.

MindFort, backed by Y Combinator (X25), reached $220K in revenue by September 2025 and is already finding vulnerabilities in production systems that legacy tools miss entirely.