Two young Indian founders have raised $1.3 million in seed funding for Manicule, a San Francisco-based AI startup that wants to help software companies get picked by AI agents rather than simply ranked by search engines. The round was co-led by Y Combinator and Broom Ventures, with angel investors also participating.

Manicule is part of Y Combinator’s Spring 2026 batch. It was founded by Naman Bansal (co-founder and CEO), who grew up in Agra, Uttar Pradesh, and Shreyans Jain (co-founder and CTO).

What Manicule does

The startup calls its category “Agent Relations”: the work of making a product easy for AI agents and assistants to discover, recommend and actually use. Instead of tracking where a brand shows up in AI answers, Manicule says it handles the execution end to end. Its automated systems help software companies:

• Improve technical documentation so that models read and represent a product accurately.
• Raise visibility in AI-generated recommendations, where developers increasingly start their search for tools.
• Make products accessible to AI agents, so an agent can not only mention a tool but put it to work.

“The fundamental unit of software discovery has shifted from the Google search query to the AI prompt,” Bansal said, according to Hindustan Times. Manicule says its internal agent tooling lets its team operate at about five times the capacity of a traditional marketing agency. Its clients have included Supermemory, PromptLayer, Bright Data and Courier.

The founders’ path

Bansal began working with international technology companies at 13, building experience in developer relations, technical content and software distribution over the next five years and starting an earlier venture along the way. Jain started programming at 14 and chose a career in technology over university. He was previously a founding engineer at Supermemory, where he helped build its consumer app and scale its Model Context Protocol (MCP) server to more than 100,000 users.

“Foundation models struggle with developer tone and technical accuracy,” Jain said. “We treat this as an engineering problem, building custom agent rails internally to bridge the gap between AI automation and technical precision.”

Y Combinator general partner Aaron Epstein said Manicule is “at the frontier of how software will be discovered and purchased going forward.”

Where the money goes

Manicule plans to use the new capital to hire engineers, improve its automated workflows and expand services for enterprise customers.

Why it matters for CIOs

As AI agents start to shortlist, recommend and even buy software on behalf of teams, how a product is described to those agents becomes a real distribution channel. For technology leaders, that cuts both ways: vendors will compete to be the tool an agent chooses, and buyers will need to know why their assistants are recommending what they recommend. Manicule is one of a growing group of Indian-founded startups backed by Y Combinator this year, alongside Subvocal’s AI glasses and Broccoli AI’s home-services agents, as the shift to autonomous AI agents gathers pace.

Key facts

• Company: Manicule, San Francisco (Y Combinator Spring 2026)
• Founders: Naman Bansal (CEO) and Shreyans Jain (CTO)
• Round: $1.3 million seed, co-led by Y Combinator and Broom Ventures, with angels
• Focus: “Agent Relations”, helping AI agents discover, recommend and use software products

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