Two IIT Delhi graduates have raised $1 million in pre-seed funding for their second artificial intelligence startup, ByteAsk, an AI coding agent designed specifically for C and C++ programming.
Anirudha Kulkarni and Pratyush Saini founded ByteAsk in June 2026 after previously co-founding LawSutra AI, an AI-powered legal research platform that was acquired by Manupatra earlier this year.
According to KaroStartup, LawSutra AI attracted more than 5,000 lawyers within four months before the acquisition. The founders have now shifted their focus to software development, building an AI agent aimed at engineers working with C and C++, languages widely used in areas including automotive systems, semiconductors, trading systems and operating systems.
READ: Khosla-backed Mazama Energy raises $135 million to turn superhot rocks into clean power (September 18, 2026)
ByteAsk has been selected for Y Combinator’s Fall 2026 batch. Y Combinator lists the company as an active startup based in San Francisco and identifies Kulkarni as co-founder and CEO and Saini as co-founder and CTO.
The company’s pre-seed round was led by Y Combinator, with participation from Entrepreneur First and angel investors, according to KaroStartup. The startup plans to use the funding to expand its teams in San Francisco and Bengaluru, invest in GPU computing and training data, and develop security and on-premise infrastructure for enterprise customers.
ByteAsk is positioning itself differently from general-purpose AI coding assistants by making the compiler, debugger and testing tools part of the development workflow.
Its platform can edit code, compile it, run tests and use debugging and sanitization tools before presenting the resulting changes for review. The company says its system works with tools including GCC, LLVM, Clang, CMake, gdb, Valgrind and multiple sanitizers.
The startup also supports multiple AI models, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google models, while allowing developers to bring their API keys or connect self-hosted models through services such as vLLM, Ollama and other OpenAI-compatible endpoints.
ByteAsk’s founders bring experience in systems engineering and AI development. According to ByteAsk’s website, Kulkarni formerly worked at Optiver and Quantbox, while Saini was a founding engineer at AI security company Simbian and previously worked at ThirdAI. Both studied computer science at IIT Delhi.
The company says its product is designed for software where correctness and testing are particularly important. Its website says ByteAsk can work with running debugging sessions and provide developers with raw compiler, sanitizer and test outputs so they can review the evidence behind an AI-generated change.
READ: BlackRock-backed consortium in talks for $25 billion acquisition of Stack’s data centers (September 24, 2026)
ByteAsk’s planned expansion comes as AI coding tools increasingly move beyond code generation toward systems that can test, debug and validate software automatically.
For the two founders, the startup represents a second venture following their rapid move from LawSutra AI to ByteAsk. The company is now building its team across San Francisco and Bengaluru and targeting enterprise applications in defense, aerospace, robotics, automotive, and semiconductor development.