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YCF26· AI· Devtools

Papaya

Continuous optimization for AI agents

ActiveChecked 17h ago
Batch
F26
Status, per YC
Active
Team size
3
HQ
San Francisco, CA
In F2686 companies, 86% AI
papaya.fyiYC profile LinkedIn

Founders

  • Macy ModyFounder/CEO
  • Niyaz PuzhikkunnathFounder/CPO
  • Faiz VadakkumpadathFounder

Same space

About Papaya

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 10%+ quality improvement on the first workflow analysis.

San Francisco, CA, USA

Papaya: questions

Which YC batch was Papaya in?

Papaya was in Y Combinator's Fall 2026 batch (F26).

Is Papaya still active?

Y Combinator lists Papaya as active.

Who founded Papaya?

Papaya's founders, as listed on its YC page: Macy Mody (Founder/CEO), Niyaz Puzhikkunnath (Founder/CPO), Faiz Vadakkumpadath (Founder).

Where is Papaya based?

Papaya lists San Francisco, CA, USA as its location on YC's directory.

Not affiliated with Y Combinator. From YC's public directory. Logos via logo.dev; trademarks belong to their owners.

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