Originals · Startup · Startups & Fintech
Manicule, built by two 18-year-old founders from India, raises $1.3 Mn from Y Combinator and Broom Ventures to make software easy for AI agents to find and use
The startup calls its idea Agent Relations: making sure tools like ChatGPT and Claude recommend a client's product, and that coding agents can actually sign up and use it.
Manicule, a startup founded by two 18-year-olds from India, has raised $1.3 Mn in a seed round co-led by Y Combinator and Broom Ventures, with strategic technology angels also taking part. Citybiz reported that the money came in through SAFEs (simple agreements for future equity, a common early stage instrument) and that Manicule is part of Y Combinator's P26 batch. The company is based in San Francisco.
The pitch is a twist on developer relations, the work software companies do to win over engineers with documentation, tutorials and community outreach. Manicule argues that the next buyer is often an AI agent: a developer asks ChatGPT, Claude or a coding assistant which API to use and lets it wire the product in. Manicule calls its answer Agent Relations, or AgentRel. It reorganises a client's technical content, API documentation and sign-up flows so that language models recommend the product and agents can register, test an integration and run tasks without a human stepping in.
Manicule says it differs from AI visibility tools that only track how often a brand shows up in chatbot answers, because it also does the writing and fixing, using its own AI agents with human review. Customers named in coverage include Supermemory, PromptLayer, Bright Data, Courier, Greptile, Reducto, Mastra and Agentmail. According to Dealroom, the company says it reached $53,000 in monthly revenue and that rebuilt documentation for Supermemory lifted its answer success rate by 37%. These are company figures that outlets have not independently checked.
Naman Bansal, the CEO, started doing freelance developer relations work for overseas startups at 13 while living in Agra. Shreyans Jain, the CTO, began writing software at 14 and joined Supermemory as a founding engineer instead of going to college. The new money will go into core engineering, the company's internal agent automation and more technical account staff, with the developer tools market as the first target before other software categories.
