ByteAsk, an AI coding agent startup, has secured $1 million in a pre-seed funding round spearheaded by Y Combinator and Entrepreneur First, alongside contributions from angel investors.

The founders earlier created and sold the legal AI startup LawSutra AI to Manupatra, an online platform for legal research.

The funding will be allocated by the startup for developing products and infrastructure, expanding its teams in engineering and research, as well as for GPU computing and training data. It also intends to establish enterprise-level security, privacy, and on-site infrastructure for clients.

Established this year by Anirudha Kulkarni and Pratyush Saini, ByteAsk is developing AI coding assistants for C and C++ codebases. The platform is intended for engineers engaged in mission-critical applications in fields such as defence, aerospace, robotics, high-frequency trading, finance, embedded systems, automotive, and semiconductors.

ByteAsk seeks to overcome the shortcomings of current AI coding tools in C and C++ development, especially in settings where correctness, performance, and reliability are essential.

The startup referenced industry estimates that place C++ at approximately $400 billion in yearly engineering salary expenditures. It views agentic coding as an approximately $10 billion opportunity that is expanding quickly.

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ByteAsk aims to first focus on major corporations in high-frequency trading, automotive, and embedded systems sectors before broadening into related markets.

It asserts that engineers engage with its platform approximately six times more frequently each day compared to a similar open source coding tool, with weekly active users doubling every week.

ByteAsk reported that its grounding environment allowed a smaller model to solve 89% of internal firmware engineering tickets, whereas the best frontier model tested without the environment only resolved 61%.

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The startup is additionally working on a post-training method for C++, intending to launch a language model uniquely post-trained for C++ in the upcoming six to eight months.