Darell Chua is Co-Founder and CEO of Daqstra, an AI-native orchestration layer for physical R&D and hardware test infrastructure. He leads the Y Combinator Summer 2026 company from San Francisco.

Darell earned an MS in Computer Engineering from UC San Diego and previously worked in Systems Performance Architecture at Rivian. He was also a Member of Technical Staff at DSO National Laboratories in Singapore.

Darell met his co-founder Anchit Kumar while testing liquid rocket engines in the Mojave Desert, and has worked across 10+ test campaigns. His rocket avionics research won the People's Choice Best Poster award at UC San Diego's Research Expo 2024.

Daqstra graduated from Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch and presented at Demo Day, with Y Combinator listed as its investor. The team started in UC San Diego's Basement Launchpad program.

Daqstra helps aerospace, energy and robotics engineers save hundreds of man hours by connecting fragmented test hardware and unifying live and historical test data. Its API lets teams orchestrate their entire test setup and focus on improving the hardware itself.