Saffron

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About Saffron

YC company profile

Helping your company find 10x engineers.

Saffron allows companies to quickly evaluate how well software engineers use AI to code.

The way engineers write code has fundamentally changed, but the way companies evaluate them hasn't. Saffron gives teams full visibility into how candidates use AI agents to build, debug, and ship real features on an actual codebase.

Saffron was founded by Robert Chondro (formerly MIT and Jane Street), Jerry Yao (Stanford and Jane Street), and Kazuma Choji (Harvey Mudd, published in NeurIPS and ICML), and is backed by Y Combinator (P26) and Afore Capital.

YC batch: Spring 2026
Founded: 2025
Team size: 3
Location: San Francisco
Country: US
Status: Active
Industry: B2B
Stage: Early
Tags: SaaS, Human Resources, HR Tech
YC partner: David Lieb

Founders

Robert Chondro — Founder/CEO

CEO
Studied math & computer science @ MIT
Building AI-native technical assessments to vet/hire SWEs

LinkedIn · X

Kazuma Choji — Founder/CTO

Building software to test how well swe's code with ai

previously:
cs/math @ Harvey Mudd
High school NeurIPS, ICML, and ICCV author

Jerry Yao — Founder/CPO

Building AI-native technical assessments
Prev. CS + math @ Stanford