ByteAsk raises $1 million for a coding agent that only writes C and C++

ByteAsk has raised a $1 million pre-seed round led by Y Combinator and Entrepreneur First, with angels from global quant-trading firms, to build ai coding agents specialised in C and C++.

Most coding agents propose a change and stop. ByteAsk compiles the change with the project's own build system, runs the test suite and pushes it through sanitizers (AddressSanitizer, ThreadSanitizer, Valgrind) before a developer sees it. It runs from the terminal or inside common IDEs, and can run fully on-premises. The company plans a C++-specific post-trained model within six to eight months.

The founders are Anirudha Kulkarni (formerly of Optiver) and Pratyush Saini (formerly of ThirdAI), who previously built and sold the legal ai startup LawSutra AI. ByteAsk was founded in June 2026 in San Francisco and is in YC's Fall 2026 batch.

Why it matters

It is narrow on purpose. The target is defence, aerospace, trading, automotive, embedded and semiconductor code, where a confident wrong answer is expensive or dangerous. Instead of asking you to trust its output, it checks against the real world before you see it. So far the coverage has been almost entirely in the Indian tech press.