ByteAsk raises $1M from YC to fix AI coding for C++ engineers
Every AI coding assistant pitched itself as universal. For the developers writing C and C++ in firmware, high-frequency trading systems, and defence software, that pitch has not delivered. ByteAsk is betting on that gap.
The San Francisco-based startup just closed a $1 million pre-seed round led by Y Combinator, with participation from Entrepreneur First and angel investors from global quantitative trading firms. ByteAsk is also part of YC’s Fall 2026 batch, one of five India-founded companies in the cohort.
Who Built This
Co-founders Anirudha Kulkarni (CEO) and Pratyush Saini (CTO) are IIT Delhi computer science graduates. Their first company, LawSutra AI, applied semantic search to legal research and was acquired by Manupatra, one of India’s leading online legal research platforms, within four months of founding. Manupatra tested LawSutra’s search technology on its own legal data and found 97.5% of results relevant to queries, the highest among AI solutions it evaluated. That technology now powers Manupatra AI Search.
Before ByteAsk, Kulkarni built low-latency C++ systems at Optiver and a Python-to-C++ optimising transpiler at Quantbox Research that cut execution time from 1.5 seconds to 150 nanoseconds in production. Saini was a Senior AI Engineer at ThirdAI working on neural network training infrastructure, then a founding engineer at SimbianAI building AI security agents that handled more than one million security incidents annually.
What ByteAsk Does Differently
Rather than another general-purpose coding assistant, ByteAsk focuses on the grounding, verification, and reasoning infrastructure needed for complex systems programming. The team gathered public evaluations of AI on C and C++, built tests around real bugs engineers had encountered, and benchmarked leading models before writing a line of product code.
On its internal benchmark of real firmware engineering tickets, ByteAsk’s grounding environment enables a smaller model to resolve 89% of tickets, compared with 61% for the best frontier model tested without the environment. The company also reports that engineers are using ByteAsk roughly six times more intensively each day than a comparable open-source coding agent, with weekly active users doubling week on week.
The Market They’re Targeting
ByteAsk cites industry estimates putting C++ at approximately $400 billion in annual salary spend globally, with agentic coding representing a roughly $10 billion opportunity growing year on year. Initial focus is on large firms in high-frequency trading, automotive, and embedded systems, with plans to expand into adjacent markets after that.
The company is also developing a post-training approach specifically for C++, with a target of releasing one of the first language models post-trained for the language within the next six to eight months.
The fresh capital goes toward expanding engineering and research teams across San Francisco and Bengaluru, GPU compute, training data, and enterprise-grade on-premises infrastructure for customers in sensitive industries.
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