Almanac (YC S26)

I asked a founder about his competitors. His answer wasn’t what I expected. I recently had an investor conversation with Rohan Sharma , co-founder of Almanac (YC S26) , and naturally, competition came up. Rohan’s perspective was refreshingly simple: don’t build by looking sideways. Build around the customer. His focus is on making Almanac so useful that customers genuinely love using it — and the team has some very ambitious ideas for where to take the product next. Perhaps the best endorsement: after seeing what they’re building, I will start using Almanac myself. Definitely a company to watch. Wishing Rohan and the team every success with their upcoming raise. It’s a mindset I’ll be keeping close as we prepare to launch Numeris with our first users in the UK. #Startups #AI #Founders #Investing

Eleven years ago we were three kids grinding JEE in the same room. Today we're a Y Combinator company. There was no plan to build a company together back then. After JEE, we went in very different directions. I went to Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, then Harvard University, and spent time working on ML research across places like the Vector Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kushagra went to Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, then Harvard for a master’s in Data Science. Divit went to Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani and spent several years building software at Arcesium. For years, we weren’t building anything together. But we kept talking. About what we were working on. About AI getting better. About things that still felt broken. About what we would build if we ever got the chance to work together again. Eventually, we did. The first thing we built wasn’t Almanac (YC S26). We tried ideas, changed direction, threw things away and kept building until we found a problem we couldn’t stop thinking about: AI agents can work across a company’s tools. What they don’t have is a living understanding of the company behind those tools. That became Almanac. We’ve spent the last 1.5 years building it, and now we’re building together at YC S26. The YC photo is a nice milestone. The real story is everything around it: late nights, arguments over ideas, playing together, travelling, and spending far too much time with each other.