Y Combinator

2026-11-03

COMPANIES · 1 SOURCE · TechCrunch AI

Y Combinator’s Garry Tan says he spends $100k–$200k/year on AI agent tokens and shared 'gstack' Claude Code skills

On Walter Isaacson’s podcast The Builders, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan said he spends about $100,000–$200,000 a year on tokens for AI agents, uses agents for many work and personal tasks, and has published a set of 23 Claude Code skills called 'gstack' on GitHub; he also described an internal YC agent named 'Stray Light' that holds company-wide founder context. Tan said high costs are a barrier to mainstream personal agents and expressed concern about agents controlled by large tech platforms.

6.0

2026-10-29

COMPANIES · 1 SOURCE · TechCrunch AI

Deepgram acquires Daily, maker of Pipecat open-source voice/video framework

Deepgram has acquired Daily, the company behind Pipecat, a popular open-source framework for managing real-time voice and video pipelines; the purchase price was not disclosed and Pipecat will remain open-source. Deepgram also announced the Real-Time Context Standard (RCS), an open protocol co-developed with the Pipecat team to encode audio context and guidance for voice agents.

7.0

2026-10-05

COMPANIES · 1 SOURCE · TechCrunch AI

HackerRank makes AI interviewer Chakra generally available after beta

HackerRank is making Chakra, an AI interviewer that observes candidates working on real code repositories, asks contextual follow-ups, and scores reasoning and “AI fluency,” generally available after about six months in beta. The company says Chakra ran more than 500,000 interviews during testing with customers such as Snowflake, Snorkel, and Capgemini, and reported 70–80% fewer suspicious-activity flags versus traditional assessments.

6.0

2026-09-17

STARTUPS · 1 SOURCE · TechCrunch AI

Startups and labs are using AI tools to monitor agent swarms

As AI agents take on longer, higher-volume tasks, companies and safety labs are building AI-based monitors to oversee agent behavior—examples include Apollo Research’s Watcher and Goodfire’s Silico—while investors pour funding into observability startups. Researchers warn this approach can help scale oversight but creates adversarial dynamics where malicious agents may try to deceive monitoring AIs.

7.0

2026-09-14

COMPANIES · 1 SOURCE · TechCrunch AI

Superhuman acquires YC‑backed meeting notetaker Fathom amid push for agentic productivity features

Superhuman has acquired Fathom, a YC‑backed meeting notetaker that offers a generous free plan and reports over 400,000 monthly active users and more than 1 million recorded meetings to date. The deal comes as productivity platforms increasingly move toward more agentic, automated workflows for tasks like note taking and meeting capture.

6.0