ByteAsk Raises $1 Million in Pre-Seed Funding to Build AI Coding Agents for C and C++

September 24, 2026: AI coding startup ByteAsk has raised $1 million in pre-seed funding from Y Combinator and Entrepreneur First, along with angel investors from leading global quantitative trading firms.

Founded in June 2026 by Anirudha Kulkarni and Pratyush Saini, both IIT Delhi computer science graduates, ByteAsk is developing AI coding agents specifically for C and C++ developers working in environments where reliability, performance, security and correctness are critical.

The company has also been selected for Y Combinator’s Fall 2026 batch and is among five India-founded young companies in the cohort, according to the press release.

From Legal AI to Systems Programming

ByteAsk is the second startup founded by Kulkarni and Saini.

The two founders previously built LawSutra AI, a legal technology startup focused on semantic legal search. LawSutra was acquired by Manupatra within four months of its founding after gaining more than 5,000 lawyers as users, according to the company.

ByteAsk emerged from the founders’ experience with AI tools for software development and their view that current coding agents have not delivered the same productivity gains for C and C++ developers as they have for other programming environments.

The company is therefore focusing on the grounding, verification and reasoning infrastructure required to make AI coding systems more useful for complex systems programming. Before developing the product, the team said it studied publicly available AI evaluations, built tests using real engineering bugs and assessed leading AI models to identify their limitations in C and C++.

Anirudha Kulkarni, Co-Founder and CEO of ByteAsk, said the company was created to address the engineering challenges faced by developers working with languages that underpin many critical systems.

He said the founders’ experience at LawSutra reinforced the idea that AI models become more useful when supported by the right context, verification and workflow infrastructure.

Targeting High-Stakes Engineering Environments

ByteAsk is initially targeting organisations operating in sectors including high-frequency trading, automotive, embedded systems, defence, aerospace, robotics, finance and semiconductors.

The company believes these industries represent an opportunity for specialised AI coding agents because developers often work with large, performance-sensitive codebases where errors can have significant operational consequences.

Pratyush Saini, Co-Founder and CTO of ByteAsk, said C and C++ continue to power a significant portion of critical infrastructure, while existing AI coding systems have not translated equally well into these environments.

“We wanted to work on a problem where reliability, verification and context matter as much as generation,” Saini said.

The press release cites industry estimates suggesting C++ represents approximately $400 billion in annual salary spend, while the founders estimate the agentic coding opportunity at around $10 billion and growing.

Founders Bring AI and High-Performance Computing Experience

Kulkarni holds B.Tech and M.Tech degrees in Computer Science from IIT Delhi and previously worked on low-latency C++ systems at Optiver and markets engineering at Quantbox Research.

According to the company, he developed a Python-to-C++ optimising transpiler at Quantbox that reduced execution time from 1.5 seconds to 150 nanoseconds in production environments.

Saini, also an IIT Delhi computer science graduate, previously worked as a Senior AI Engineer at ThirdAI and as a founding engineer at SimbianAI, where he contributed to AI security agents handling more than one million security incidents annually. At LawSutra AI, he developed the startup’s search engine and evaluation system.

Funding to Support Engineering, Research and Infrastructure

ByteAsk plans to use the fresh capital to expand its engineering and research teams in San Francisco and Bengaluru, while increasing investment in GPU compute, training data and enterprise infrastructure.

The company is also working on security, privacy and on-premises deployment capabilities for customers operating in sensitive industries.

Its initial commercial focus will be on large companies in high-frequency trading, automotive and embedded systems, before expanding into adjacent markets.

ByteAsk says its engineers currently use the platform around six times more intensively per day than a comparable open-source coding agent, while weekly active users are doubling week-on-week. These figures are company-reported.

The startup also reports that, on an internal benchmark involving real firmware engineering tickets, its grounding environment enabled a smaller model to resolve 89% of tickets, compared with 61% for the best frontier model it tested without that environment. The benchmark has not been independently verified in the press release.

Developing a C++-Focused Language Model

Beyond its coding agent, ByteAsk is developing a specialised post-training approach for C++.

The company aims to release what it describes as one of the first language models specifically post-trained for C++ within the next six to eight months.

With operations spanning the US and India, ByteAsk is positioning itself around a specialised segment of the AI developer-tools market, focusing on complex engineering environments where accuracy, reliability, security and performance are essential.