Papaya

<!-- hacklab:yc-profile -- YC company profile Continuously improve the quality of your AI agents. Papaya is the optimization engine for AI agents. Engineers don't have time to c…

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About Papaya

YC company profile

Continuously improve the quality of your AI agents.

Papaya is the optimization engine for AI agents. Engineers don't have time to continually improve the agents they've shipped — the context bloat, overly chatty subagents, and broken tool calls sit in production traces nobody reads, quietly hurting agent efficiency. With Papaya they connect their agent directly via SDK, get actionable recommendations on how to improve quality, latency, and cost, and the ones they approve are pushed to production as pull requests.

Papaya runs 200+ research-backed analyses across context, prompts, prompt caching, subagents, and tool calls. Every recommendation is ranked by impact and comes with the production runs that produced it — typically a 20%+ quality improvement on the first workflow analysis.

YC batch: Fall 2026
Founded: 2026
Team size: 3
Location: San Francisco
Country: US
Status: Active
Industry: B2B
Stage: Early
Tags: AIOps, Developer Tools, B2B, Enterprise Software, AI
YC partner: Andrew Miklas

Founders

Macy Mody — Founder/CEO

Co-Founder & CEO at Papaya (YC F26). Previously led GTM and Ops at SafeBase from $0-10M ARR and through its acquisition. Also led analytics products at HqO and managed investments for AmEx Digital Labs. UMich undergrad and HBS MBA.

Niyaz Puzhikkunnath — Founder/CPO

Founder at Papaya. Previously Sr. SDE at Amazon for 10+ years building large-scale ML systems across Computer Vision, Classification, LLMs/Agents. Led teams on brand and product classification, built agent evaluation workflows, and created a self-service ML training pipeline. Earlier, one of the first engineers at Zovi.com, where he helped build the front-end architecture and internal analytics.

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Faiz Vadakkumpadath — Founder

Founder at Papaya (YC F26). Previously Senior Data Engineer at Amazon for 10 years, leading teams for the enterprise Data Lake, solving problems at Exabyte scale. Earlier scaled Vodafone's MPESA mobile money system in Africa from 25 to 200 tps at IBM. Co-founded OpenReporting, a SaaS financial reporting tool.