Utkarsh Bali
building Checkpoint (opens in a new tab)
- As a kid, I drew up quadcopters, sketched Iron Man suits, and built motor-powered cars I insisted on calling “Thrust SSC.”
- In high school, I started building the apps and games I wished existed.
- Came to Purdue in 2023 for CS and AI, with a minor in psychology.
- Started doing AI research there in my second year, and spent a year on a Microsoft collaboration reading a few million social posts about Minecraft.
- Built WalleX, an AI wallpaper app, around the same time. 3,000+ people in 22 countries used it. The first thing I made that had real users in it.
- Built a clinical assistant that nurses tested across Indiana hospitals. It cut about 40% of their documentation time, and it runs on the hospital’s own hardware, because patient data should not leave the building.
- Worked for a San Francisco-based YC startup, QualGent (YC X25), reporting to the CTO, and built agent infrastructure into production for the first time.
- Co-founded Checkpoint to build agent testing infrastructure. YC told us we were in the top 10% of Summer 2026 applicants, then didn’t interview us. It’s live in private beta.
- Spent this summer at Recurly, building the thing that automates the company’s Product Development Lifecycle (PDLC). It turns a product requirement into shipped production software. Also, built a Sales outbound automation tool to assist SDRs.
- Spent the last few months on an AI research paper with Purdue and Harvard Business School faculty. It got into a NeurIPS 2026 workshop, and it goes to Sydney in December.
- TA’d AI courses twice and ran weekly ML workshops for a few hundred students along the way.
- Finishing at Purdue in December.
Selected work
Recurly Agent Platform
Takes a product requirement and turns it into merged pull requests. Five agents do the work. A human signs off five times.
~3x faster from requirement to merge
Checkpoint
CI/CD for AI agents. Adversarial test suites that run before an agent ever meets a user.
Top 10% of YC Summer 2026 applicants
App Crawler
Walks an Android app screen by screen and writes down how it works, so other agents don’t have to figure it out themselves.
<1% task failure rate at scale
Where the work went
Recurly
Checkpoint
QualGent
QualGent AI Assistant, November 2025, QualGent, Software Engineer Intern, ShippedApp Crawler, December 2025, QualGent, Software Engineer Intern, Shipped
Purdue University
Microsoft
Independent
Get in touch
- GitHubbaliutkarsh2 (opens in a new tab)
- LinkedInin/ubali (opens in a new tab)
- X@ubali07 (opens in a new tab)
- RésuméPDF (PDF, opens in a new tab)
Also an essay (opens in a new tab) on Medium: What a Quiet Mind Taught Me About God, Family, and Infinity.