Bengaluru boy in prestigious startup accelerator Y Combinator

A 20-year-old software engineer from Bengaluru, Nand Vinchhi, has been accepted into the Winter 2025 cohort of the prestigious Y Combinator (YC).

YC, based in San Francisco, USA, is one of the world’s premier startup accelerators. It has fostered some of the biggest names in tech, such as Airbnb, Dropbox, and Stripe.

Twice a year, the accelerator selects a small group of startups, providing them with funding, mentorship, and a network to help them scale up rapidly. Vinchhi is raising a seed round for Axal.ai, a company he co-founded.

A National Public School (Koramangala) alumnus, he excelled in academics while leading his school’s Cyber Club. He has also won 25 international hackathons and secured prestigious accolades.

While working on high-profile projects through the University of Maryland’s App Dev Club, the students who were members of the Club identified a major problem: new team members had difficulty in understanding some of the code.

Developing AI-assisted tools to solve this challenge, they encountered a much larger problem — legacy code that needed to be modernised. This insight led to Axal.ai, a startup leveraging AI to streamline outdated codebases.