Naman Bansal and Shreyans Jain, two young Indian founders, have raised $1.3 million in seed funding for Manicule, their San Francisco-based AI startup, per Hindustan Times.

The round was co-led by Y Combinator and Broom Ventures, with participation from angel investors, a detail corroborated by Venture Intelligence News.

Manicule is an AI-native technical documentation and Developer Relations startup that helps software and developer tool companies become discoverable, understandable and usable by both humans and AI agents.

Bansal, the CEO, grew up in Agra and began working with international technology companies at 13, while Jain, the CTO, started coding at 14 and skipped university to pursue technology.

What makes Manicule surprising is its core thesis: the way software gets discovered has fundamentally changed.

"The fundamental unit of software discovery has shifted from the Google search query to the AI prompt," Bansal said, arguing that passive tracking dashboards do not bring in customers, so Manicule handles execution end-to-end so AI models do not just mention clients but choose and use them.

The company replaces passive analytics with an automated execution engine that recommends and executes client software, according to Venture Intelligence News.

It claims its automation lets the team operate at five times the capacity of traditional marketing agencies, with clients including Supermemory, PromptLayer, Bright Data and Courier.

Hindustan Times reports that Jain previously worked as a founding engineer at Supermemory, where he helped build its consumer application and scale its Model Context Protocol server to more than 100,000 users.

"Foundation models struggle with developer tone and technical accuracy," Jain told the outlet, describing how the team builds custom agent rails internally to bridge the gap between AI automation and technical precision.

The startup is part of Y Combinator's Spring 2026 batch, and YC general partner Aaron Epstein said Manicule is "at the frontier of how software will be discovered and purchased going forward."

The new capital will fund engineering recruitment, automated workflow improvements and expansion for enterprise customers.

Manicule's backing lands amid visible Y Combinator momentum.

YC has launched more than 5,000 companies with a combined valuation exceeding $1.3 trillion since its 2005 founding, Cornell's The Daily Sun reports, and co-founder Paul Graham told a packed 600-person Cornell auditorium that the best startup ideas come from genuine curiosity rather than money alone.

"Whatever startup idea you have now, you'll have a better one in two years anyway," Graham said, urging students to finish their degrees.