Akshay Subramaniam

Akshay Subramaniam
Occupation	Software engineer, entrepreneur
Known for	Co-founder of Haystack Software

Akshay Subramaniam is an American software engineer and entrepreneur who is the co-founder of Haystack Software, a code review platform that helps developers understand pull requests quickly using an infinite canvas interface. The company was part of the Y Combinator Summer 2024 batch.

Career

Prior to founding Haystack Software, Subramaniam worked as a software engineer at Figma, the collaborative design tool. He has a background in building emulators, video games, and productivity software. Earlier in his career, Subramaniam conducted research in the field of electrochemical engineering, co-authoring several peer-reviewed papers on lithium-ion battery modeling published in journals such as the Journal of The Electrochemical Society. His academic publications include work on tanks-in-series approaches to lithium-ion battery models and solid-phase diffusion reformulation techniques. He also presented at NVIDIA's GTC 2020 conference on performance analysis and optimization topics.

In 2024, Subramaniam co-founded Haystack Software with Jake Yatvitskiy. The company is based in New York and operates in the developer tools space. Haystack Software's primary product is a code review platform designed to replace traditional line-by-line diff views used in platforms such as GitHub. Instead, the tool breaks down pull requests into smaller, structured segments and presents them on an infinite canvas, providing developers with a visual walkthrough of code changes. The platform also incorporates artificial intelligence capabilities, allowing users to interact with an AI assistant that has already analyzed the pull request in question.

The product initially began as a canvas-based integrated development environment (IDE) intended to make code navigation and refactoring significantly faster. It has since evolved to focus on the code review workflow, targeting engineering teams that need to review and merge code efficiently without sacrificing quality. Haystack Software operates in the business-to-business (B2B) market, spanning the artificial intelligence, developer tools, and productivity sectors.

The company was founded with a small team and participated in Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch under the guidance of group partner David Lieb. As of its YC listing, the company remains active.