Yuga Patel is Co-Founder of Ekpa, a Y Combinator-backed startup building autonomous research agents for trading, selected for the prestigious Summer 2026 YC batch.

Yuga studied Computer Science, AI, and Economics at MIT, where he developed a deep foundation in machine learning and quantitative systems.

Before MIT, Yuga co-founded GRAM (Games and Robotics Academy for Minorities) as a high school senior at McNair Academic in Jersey City, teaching coding, game development, and robotics to underrepresented youth in Greenville.

At Ekpa, Yuga and co-founder Anant Asthana are scaling autonomous research agents that use markets as a verification loop, turning AI-generated hypotheses into tested trading strategies.

Backed by Y Combinator's S2026 cohort, Ekpa operates out of Boston with a lean two-person team disrupting the consumer finance and algorithmic trading space with agentic AI research.