Founded in June 2026, ByteAsk is headquartered in San Francisco and has operations in the US and India. It has also been selected for Y Combinator’s Fall 2026 batch.
“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,” Anirudha Kulkarni, cofounder and CEO, ByteAsk said.
He added that 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.”
ByteAsk was founded by Kulkarni and Pratyush Saini, who cofounded of legal AI startup LawSutra AI, which was acquired by legal research company Manupatra within four months of its launch. Both founders are IIT Delhi computer science graduates.
The founders said they started ByteAsk after seeing limitations in the performance of generic AI coding tools on C and C++, particularly in environments where reliability, performance and correctness are critical.
“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 Saini, cofounder and CTO, ByteAsk. “We wanted to work on a problem where reliability, verification and context matter as much as generation.”
ByteAsk plans to use the fresh capital 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.
ByteAsk said engineers are using its product 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, the company said its smaller model resolves 89% of tickets, compared with 61% for the best frontier model tested without the environment.
The startup 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.
Nemil Dalal, visiting partner at 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.”
