IIT Delhi-Duo Founded ByteAsk Raises $1M in YC-led Funding to Reinvent AI Coding for C++

[L-R] – Pratyush Saini, Co-founder and CTO, ByteAsk, Anirudha Kulkarni, co-founder and CEO ByteASK 

ByteAsk raises $1 million in YC-led pre-seed round to build AI coding agents for C and C++

ByteAsk, founded by former LawSutra AI co-founders Anirudha Kulkarni and Pratyush Saini, is building AI coding agents for C and C++ developers working in high-stakes industries.

Anirudha Kulkarni and Pratyush Saini, two IIT Delhi computer science graduates who previously built and sold legal AI startup LawSutra AI to Manupatra, one of India’s pioneers in online legal research, have started their second company, ByteAsk. The company has raised $1 million in pre-seed funding from Y Combinator and Entrepreneur First, alongside investments from angels working at leading global quantitative trading firms.

Founded in June 2026 and headquartered in San Francisco, with operations spanning the US and India, ByteAsk is building AI coding agents for C and C++, focused on developers working in mission-critical environments across defence, aerospace, robotics, high-frequency trading, finance, embedded systems, automotive and semiconductors. The company has also been selected for Y Combinator's Fall 2026 batch and is one of five India-founded young companies in the cohort. It is the only India-founded company in the batch focused on the “neolab” model of building deeply technical companies around emerging AI capabilities.

The founders, Anirudha Kulkarni and Pratyush Saini, first met as undergraduate students at IIT Delhi and worked together on multiple academic projects before starting LawSutra AI in January 2026. The legal-tech startup set out to make legal research faster and more reliable with AI, addressing the limitations of traditional keyword-based tools and the difficulty of relying on generic AI chatbots for high-stakes legal work due to hallucinations and unreliable citations. Anirudha’s family background in law gave the founders an early understanding of these challenges and how they affected lawyers in their day-to-day work.

LawSutra addressed the gap through semantic legal search, enabling the system to understand the context and meaning behind a legal query rather than relying solely on exact keyword matches. By building closely with lawyers and incorporating their feedback into the product, the startup quickly attracted interest from 5,000+ lawyers and saw its user base grow week-on-week, making it one of the fastest-growing legal-tech startups in its segment. This early combination of user adoption, product validation and growing market traction led to the startup being acquired by Manupatra, one of India’s pioneers in online legal research and a leading legal technology ecosystem, within four months of its founding.

Manupatra tested LawSutra's search technology on its own legal data. 97.5% of the results were found to be relevant to the queries, the highest among the AI solutions tested. Its technology now runs inside Manupatra AI Search, which serves lawyers, judges, law firms, government institutions and other legal professionals across India.

Both founders bring deep experience across AI, C++, systems engineering and high-performance computing, with their professional careers spanning quantitative trading, AI infrastructure, cybersecurity and developer systems.

Kulkarni holds a B.Tech and an M.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Delhi. Before ByteAsk, he worked on low-latency C++ systems at Optiver and core data and markets engineering at Quantbox Research, where he built a Python-to-C++ optimising transpiler that reduced execution time from 1.5 seconds to 150 nanoseconds in production environments. He was also part of Optiver’s Delta One trading team and has a background in competitive programming and quantitative research.

Saini holds a B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Delhi. Before ByteAsk, he was a Senior AI Engineer at ThirdAI, where he worked on large-scale neural network training and inference infrastructure, and a founding engineer at SimbianAI, where he helped build AI security agents handling more than a million security incidents annually. At LawSutra AI, he designed the search engine and lawyer-grade evaluation system that formed the core of the company’s legal AI technology.

Deepak Kapoor, Founder and CEO, Manupatra, said, “LawSutra’s semantic capability stood out for combining strong technology with a clear understanding of how lawyers actually research. Its performance on Manupatra’s proprietary data, together with the team’s technical depth and responsiveness, led us to explore the acquisition. By integrating this capability with Manupatra’s proprietary legal database and research platform, we can now bring more intuitive, intent-driven legal search to the wider legal community through Manupatra AI Search.”

From legal AI to the software behind critical systems

ByteAsk was born out of a personal pain point the founders had experienced firsthand. They saw an important gap in how AI was being applied to C and C++, particularly for developers working in environments where reliability, performance and correctness are critical. While AI coding tools had dramatically changed software development, they found that the same gains had not translated equally well to C and C++.

The founders identified a significant gap in model performance on C and C++. Rather than building another generic AI coding assistant, they decided to focus on the grounding, verification and reasoning infrastructure required to make AI useful for complex systems programming. Before building the product, the team gathered publicly available evaluations of AI on C and C++, built its own tests around real bugs engineers had encountered, and evaluated leading AI models to understand where they failed.

“Seeing AI transform software development while C and C++ developers still struggle with the limitations of generic coding agents made us realise there was a significant gap to address. From the very beginning, we wanted to work on a problem that was technically difficult and had a large global upside. C++ sits underneath many of the systems the world depends on, but AI has not yet solved the engineering challenges developers face there. Building LawSutra taught us that models are only as useful as the context, verification and workflows around them. At ByteAsk, we are applying that same philosophy to code”, said Anirudha Kulkarni, Co-Founder and CEO, ByteAsk.

According to industry estimates, C++ represents an approximately $400 billion industry in annual salary spend, while they see agentic coding as a roughly $10 billion opportunity growing rapidly year-on-year. Rather than attempting to serve every software developer immediately, ByteAsk is starting with organisations where the combination of C++, AI and reliability creates the most acute need.

“C and C++ power a huge amount of the world's critical infrastructure, but the gains we've seen from AI coding tools have not translated equally well to these environments,” said Pratyush Saini, Co-Founder and CTO, ByteAsk. “We wanted to work on a problem where reliability, verification and context matter as much as generation.”

Commenting on the investment, Nemil Dalal, Visiting Partner Y Combinator, said, “When applying to Y Combinator for ByteAsk, what stood out about Anirudha and Pratyush was their passion, authenticity, and technical expertise. They saw a large group of software developers that were left out of current AI coding tools and had figured out how to make them more productive.”

Building AI coding agents for high-stakes engineering

The fresh capital raised will support ByteAsk’s next phase of product and infrastructure development, with the company planning to expand its engineering and research teams across 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 company plans to initially focus on large firms in high-frequency trading, automotive and embedded systems, before expanding into adjacent markets. The founders say that engineers are using ByteAsk approximately six times more intensively each day than a comparable open-source coding agent, while its weekly active users are doubling week-on-week. On its internal benchmark of real firmware engineering tickets, ByteAsk says its grounding environment enables a smaller model to resolve 89% of tickets, compared with 61% for the best frontier model tested without the environment.

ByteAsk is also developing its own post-training approach for C++, with the aim of releasing one of the first language models specifically post-trained for the language within the next six to eight months.

About ByteAsk

ByteAsk is building AI coding agents for C and C++. Founded in 2026 by IIT Delhi alumni Anirudha Kulkarni and Pratyush Saini, ByteAsk focuses on helping engineers solve complex software problems in mission-critical environments where accuracy, reliability, security and performance are essential. The company is backed by Y Combinator and Entrepreneur First, with additional support from angel investors from the quantitative trading industry.