ByteAsk, a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence infrastructure and autonomous software engineering startup, has raised $1 million in pre-seed funding to develop AI coding tools for C and C++ developers.

The round was co-led by Y Combinator and Entrepreneur First, with participation from angel investors, including individuals from global quantitative trading firms.

ByteAsk will use the funding to expand its machine learning research and software engineering teams, increase its GPU computing capacity, acquire specialized training datasets, and develop enterprise security, data privacy and on-premises deployment infrastructure.

Founded in 2026 by Anirudha Kulkarni and Pratyush Saini, ByteAsk is building an AI coding agent and secure grounding environment specifically for C and C++ development. The platform is designed for engineers working on systems across defense, aerospace, robotics, high-frequency trading, embedded systems and automotive semiconductors.

The company says its platform focuses on areas such as debugging, performance optimization, memory management, code grounding and verification rather than basic code generation.

ByteAsk is also developing a specialized post-training approach for C++ and plans to launch a large language model tailored to low-level software engineering within the next six to eight months.

The startup says its grounding environment resolved 89% of real firmware engineering tickets in an internal benchmark, compared with 61% for the best frontier model tested without the environment. These figures are company-reported and based on its own testing.

ByteAsk was also selected for Y Combinator’s Fall 2026 batch and plans to expand its teams across San Francisco and Bengaluru as it develops its AI coding platform.