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Understudy Labs

Effortlessly move to open weight models

An open-source toolkit to capture traces, evaluate cheaper models against benchmarks, and ship specialist routes you own. Capture traces from LLM production workflows with a single install that deploys within coding agents you already use. Hosted infrastructure is optional. Evaluate the captured traces and set a benchmark for success. Every future model switch meets or exceeds it in A/B testing. Train and fine-tune a new model on prompts and weights you always own. Start locally and scale into cloud-hosted processes as you see success. Deploy a new model only when the held-out eval is beaten. Serve it wherever you want. Production data feeds back into training and compounds performance over time. Test. Learn. Deploy. Repeat.
Active Founders
Luis Manrique
Luis Manrique
Founder
Founder at Understudy Labs (YC S26). Previously founding Member of Technical Staff (and founding sales guy) at Gumloop, closing ~$2M in first year. Led Ads ML and also consumer AI as first PM at Instacart's Carrot AI. Prior co-founder/CEO at Ones and Zeros (text-to-SQL using transformers). Early at Wildfire (acquired by Google), then 5 years across Google's ads ML and programmatic platforms. SVP Solutions at VideoAmp building TV measurement infrastructure.
Aamir Poonawalla
Aamir Poonawalla
CTO & Co-Founder
Founder at Understudy Labs (YC S26). 9 years at Instacart. Built the ads serving and ML infrastructure, auction platform, and experimentation framework. 2nd time YC Founder. MS in Computer Science from Georgia Tech.
YC Summer 2026 Application Video
Understudy Labs
Founded:2026
Batch:Summer 2026
Team Size:2
Status:
Active
Location:San Francisco
Primary Partner:Tyler Bosmeny