Alex Battikha.
I build things. Currently: strvX, AI that handles the busywork for small businesses so owners can actually run them. On the side, I research surgical robotics at UC San Diego.
What I'm working on this week
Shipping the first strvX customer pilots.
Co-leading ecPATH toward a Nature submission.
Tuning quant strategies for live deployment.
Bioengineering coursework at UCSD, year one of four.
Ventures & research
strvX
AI that runs the boring parts of a small business so the owner can get back to running the business.
ecPATH
ML pipeline that spots extrachromosomal DNA straight from histopathology images. Shipping it into hospitals next.
LapSurge
Teleoperated laparoscopic surgery on a humanoid robot. I work on tool-tip precision with ToF sensors and visual lasers.
Quant Research
Building algos for equities and options. Signal research, backtesting, and execution, end to end.
FTC 11212 · The Clueless
Six seasons leading the team to a World Championship in Houston. Robot reliability above 99%. Watch us in Behind the Bot.
Swarm Robotics @ Johns Hopkins
Built a 5-robot testbed that proves a new fail-over protocol for wireless distributed systems. Presented at JHU Design Day.
Neuron
An AI co-pilot for tutors. Built because 1:1 learning shouldn't only be for families that can spend $100 an hour on it.
Alex Tutoring
Math, science, CS. I teach the way I wish I had been taught: by building things that work.
Wins & recognition
Jacobs Scholar
2025Full-ride at UCSD. Sub-1% acceptance rate, named for Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs. 9 of us in the country every year.
FTC World Champion, 1st of 7,100+
2024Captained The Clueless (FTC 11212) to first place at Worlds in Houston. Mechanical lead, driving coach, six years on the team.
U.S. Youth Delegate
20241 of 9 U.S. youth delegates picked for a UN-affiliated environmental conference.
San Diego's 25 Most Remarkable Teens
2024Named in the Robotics category by San Diego County as a Westview High senior.
Patent Pending at Johns Hopkins
2025Co-inventor on a new robotics communication protocol with the JHU Information Security Institute.
UCLA Cryptographic Research
2024Designed a novel PUF with Prof. Potkonjak. Broke and stress-tested it with NIST stats and adversarial AI.
Selected projects
Autonomous Pollution Drone
Full-scale UAV that spots ocean trash on its own. YOLOv8 tuned to 96% precision on a 6,000+ image dataset.
Cryptographic PUF
Hardware fingerprint that resists cloning. Validated with NIST stats and AI-driven attacks at UCLA.
Swarm Testbed @ JHU
5 robots, TCP/IP, fail-over protocol. A patent rode on whether they could coordinate without a leader.
Tech I reach for
How I work
Six years captaining FTC 11212, rookie season to World Champions (1st of 7,100+). A few things that stuck.
Reliability is the real flex
99.1% mechanical uptime across a 25-week build. Nobody claps for a robot that dies in the final.
Own the whole stack
CAD, CNC, code, driver. I learn every layer before I trust the robot in my hands.
Calm is a skill
There's pressure not to screw up. You talk through the chaos instead of over it.
Play the long game
Six years on one team. Worlds didn't happen in year one, or year three.
Have an idea, a deal, or want to jam on AI and robotics?
Founder intros, research collabs, wild ideas. I reply to all of them.