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AI coding agent startup ByteAsk has raised $1 million in a pre seed funding round led by Y Combinator and Entrepreneur First, with participation from angel investors. The founders previously built and sold legal AI startup LawSutra AI to Manupatra, an online legal research platform. The startup will use the funds for product and infrastructure development, hiring across engineering and research, GPU compute and training data. It also plans to build enterprise grade security, privacy and on premises infrastructure for customers. Founded this year by Anirudha Kulkarni and Pratyush Saini, ByteAsk is building AI coding agents for C and C++ codebases. The platform is designed for engineers working on mission critical applications across defence, aerospace, robotics, high frequency trading, finance, embedded systems, automotive and semiconductors. ByteAsk aims to address the limitations of existing AI coding tools in C and C++ development, particularly in environments where reliability, performance and correctness are critical. The startup cited industry estimates that put C++ at around $400 billion in annual engineering salary spend. It sees agentic coding as a roughly $10 billion opportunity that is growing rapidly. ByteAsk plans to initially target large enterprises in high frequency trading, automotive and embedded systems before expanding into adjacent markets. It claims engineers use its platform around six times more intensively each day than a comparable open source coding agent, while weekly active users are doubling week on week. On its internal benchmark based on real firmware engineering tickets, ByteAsk said its grounding environment enabled a smaller model to resolve 89% of tickets, compared with 61% for the best frontier model tested without the environment. The startup is also developing a post training approach for C++, with plans to release a language model specifically post trained for C++ within the next six to eight months.
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