ByteAsk has raised $1 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Y Combinator and Entrepreneur First, with participation from angel investors working at global quantitative trading firms, as the company builds AI coding agents for C and C++ developers in high-stakes industries.

The fresh capital will go towards product and infrastructure development, expanding the engineering and research teams in San Francisco and Bengaluru, GPU compute and training data, and building enterprise-grade security, privacy and on-premise infrastructure for customers in sensitive industries.

Founded in June by Anirudha Kulkarni and Pratyush Saini, ByteAsk is headquartered in San Francisco.

ByteAsk is initially targeting companies in high-frequency trading, automotive and embedded systems, before expanding into adjacent sectors including defence, aerospace, robotics, finance and semiconductors.

The founders previously built legal AI startup LawSutra AI, which was acquired by legal research platform Manupatra within four months of its founding.

Kulkarni and Saini said their experience building LawSutra shaped ByteAsk’s approach to AI coding. Rather than developing a general-purpose coding assistant, the startup is focused on the grounding, verification and reasoning infrastructure needed for C and C++, where reliability and performance are particularly important.

“AI coding tools have dramatically changed software development, but the same gains have not translated equally well to C and C++,” said Kulkarni.

ByteAsk said engineers are currently using its platform about six times more intensively each day than a comparable open-source coding agent, while weekly active users are doubling week-on-week.