The AI startup founder who runs 130 AI agents to manage his own workday

In roughly 120 countries by Yury Akinin’s (LinkedIn) count, anything touching personal data — a bank record, a patient file, even an email — has to sit on servers physically inside that country. Cloud AI from OpenAI or Anthropic routes data through servers that often aren't. That gap is what sovereign AI startups — including Avelin AI, which recently raised a USD 3.7 mn pre-seed round and now counts Nvidia Inception, AWS Activate, and Dubai Future Foundation among its technology partners — are built to close.

Each week, My Morning Routine looks at how a successful member of the community starts their day — and then throws in a couple of random business questions just for fun. This week, we spoke to Akinin, who founded Avelin AI and previously co-founded life-sciences AI company Quantori at a USD 100 mn valuation, about sovereign AI, managing data regulations, and how AI agents have reshaped his own workday. Edited excerpts from our conversation:

EnterpriseAM: Tell us how Avelin AI came to be.

Yury Akinin (YA): Avelin started in 2022 as an R&D lab. We spent that time researching how modern AI actually works — training models, fine-tuning, working across different architectures. About a year ago, I saw the commercial case had matured, and I moved into the company full-time.

Modern AI is largely controlled by a handful of American and Chinese labs, but the rest of the world needs the same capability — and it needs it to be sovereign and affordable. Avelin's platform is built around efficiency at the model level, wrapped in an inference layer and a full stack that mirrors the APIs enterprises already use from OpenAI and Anthropic.

E: Which sectors are you targeting, and why those?

YA: Financial institutions, governments, and healthcare and pharma. These are sectors where you legally cannot send private data to a cloud provider outside your borders — and pharma and healthcare in particular were already running high-performance computing internally before this AI wave, so they're primed to adopt something like Avelin. Governments are building the physical data centers; what's missing is the software layer to actually run AI inside them. That's the gap we sell into.

E: You mentioned using AI heavily yourself. How does that show up in your day-to-day?

YA: My approach comes down to three things. First, heavy discipline around time management. Second, I try to cut through noise to find the root cause of a market shift rather than reacting to the headline version of it. Third, I run about 130 AI agents that handle my daily routine: email, calendar conflicts, news, VC trend-tracking.

As basic tasks get commoditized through agents, the people on your team matter more, not less. My model is a small, highly competent core team amplified by a large bench of agents — not a large team doing commodity work.

E: What is one non-negotiable constant in your daily routine?

YA: Exercise. My day splits into two distinct shifts, and training is the hinge between them. I take business calls and meetings from around 9am to 4pm. Then I train for an hour to 90 minutes, followed by a protein shake and coffee. After that, the second shift starts as the US wakes up — East Coast calls first, then West Coast, often running past midnight. I'm usually asleep by 1am.

E: How do you approach work-life balance?

YA: I don’t believe in a rigid daily work-life balance where you force yourself to stop even when it doesn’t make sense. Instead, my balance is seasonal — period by period. When market timing is perfect and the demand is high, as it is right now with our startup, it makes sense to put full effort into work. When things slow down or during holiday periods, I shift focus to rest, family, and friends. Trying to enforce a strict daily hard stop often prevents you from achieving major business results or getting actual quality rest.

Yury’s recommendations

What he’s reading: The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt, Good to Great by Jim Collins, and Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne are business titles he returns to.

Best advice he's received: Manage your ego before you manage your calendar. He argues the bigger threat to founders isn't burnout — it's ego blocking a pivot into a new market when the data says it's time to move.