AI Coding Startup ByteAsk Raises $1 Mn Pre-Seed Funding Led by Y Combinator

San Francisco-based AI coding startup ByteAsk has raised $1 million in a pre-seed round led by Y Combinator, with participation from Entrepreneur First and angel investors from global quantitative trading firms.

Founded in June 2026 by Anirudha Kulkarni and Pratyush Saini, ByteAsk is building AI coding agents specifically for C and C++ developers, targeting industries where software reliability, performance and verification are critical. These include high-frequency trading, automotive, defence, aerospace, robotics, embedded systems and semiconductors.

The company is headquartered in San Francisco and operates across the US and India. It has also been selected for Y Combinator’s Fall 2026 batch, where it is listed as an active developer-tools and enterprise software company.

ByteAsk’s founders previously built LawSutra AI, a legal technology startup that was acquired by legal research platform Manupatra within four months of its launch. LawSutra used semantic search to help lawyers find relevant legal information based on the meaning and context of queries. The startup had attracted more than 5,000 lawyers before the acquisition, while Manupatra later reported that testing of the technology on its proprietary legal data showed 97.5% of search results were relevant.

Anirudha and Pratyush are both IIT Delhi computer science graduates. Anirudha previously worked on low-latency C++ systems at Optiver and markets engineering at Quantbox Research, while Pratyush worked on AI infrastructure at ThirdAI and AI security agents at Simbian.

ByteAsk’s own team profile says Anirudha built a Python-to-C++ transpiler at Quantbox, while Pratyush worked on CPU-first training and inference infrastructure at ThirdAI and AI security agents at Simbian.

ByteAsk was started after the founders identified limitations in generic AI coding tools when applied to C and C++, particularly for systems where debugging, memory management, performance and correctness matter as much as code generation. The company is therefore focusing on grounding, debugging and verification rather than simply generating code.

Its coding agent is designed to work with the actual development toolchain, including compilers, debuggers and test suites, so that changes can be built and tested before being presented to developers. Y Combinator describes the product as an AI coding agent that builds, debugs and tests changes using the real toolchain and can also run fully on-premises.

ByteAsk said it has built internal evaluations using real engineering bugs and publicly available benchmarks. On its internal benchmark of real firmware engineering tickets, the company said its grounding environment enabled a smaller model to resolve 89% of tickets, compared with 61% for the best frontier model tested without the environment. These figures are based on ByteAsk’s own evaluation and have not been independently validated.

The startup also said engineers are using its product approximately six times more intensively each day than a comparable open-source coding agent, while weekly active users are doubling week-on-week. These are company-reported early usage metrics.

The new capital will be used to expand ByteAsk’s engineering and research teams in San Francisco and Bengaluru, invest in GPU compute and training data, and build enterprise-grade security, privacy and on-premises infrastructure for customers in sensitive industries.

The startup is also developing a specialised post-training approach for C++ and plans to release a language model specifically post-trained for C++ within the next six to eight months.