Rohan Balkondekar

Our YC F24 Application

· Originally published on Medium

Outsight AI (www.outsight.in) Outsight AI (www.outsight.in)

Founders Intro!

Background
LinkedIn — linkedin.com/in/agokrani
Github —github.com/agokrani

Work Experience
Microsoft — Senior AI Research Scientist
Nuance Communications — Senior Research ScientistHuman Language

**Education
**RWTH Aachen University — MS, Software System Engineering

Background
LinkedIn —linkedin.com/in/rohanbalkondekar/
Github — github.com/rohanbalkondekar/
Web — rohanbalkondekar.com/
X — x.com/rohanbalkonde

Work Experience
AirArabia — GenAI Lead
Lyzr AI — SDE II (Founding Software Engineer)
Iauro — ML Engineer

Background
LinkedIn — linkedin.com/in/shashwattiwari02/
Github —github.com/Shashwattiwari02
X — x.com/Shashverse

Work Experience
Artium — AI Product Manager
Iauro—Product Manager
Upwork — Freelance PM + Musician

Background
LinkedIn — linkedin.com/in/anugrahkuantanu
Github — github.com/kuantanu
Web — www.kuantanu.com/

Work Experience
Tesla — Data Scientist
Bosch— Research Scientist

**Q. How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet? Have any of the founders not met in person?
** — Aman and Anugrah met in the gym, while Rohan and Shashwat worked together on the same team.

We all connected earlier last year when Rohan and Shashwat reached out to Aman, who worked as a Senior AI Researcher at Microsoft, for his advice on a multi-agent orchestration project.

This led to us working together on some consulting projects. Through these customer interactions, we noticed a common problem many clients faced. We thought of a product that could solve this problem, and decided to start a company together.

**Q. Who writes code, or does other technical work on your product? Was any of it done by a non-founder? Please explain.
** — Aman, Anugrah, and Rohan write code.

**Founder Video
Q. Please record a one minute video introducing the founder(s).
** — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEcCTQ9DC9Y

Embedded: youtube.com/watch

**Q. How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet? Have any of the founders not met in person?
** — We have known each other for more than a year.

While Aman and Anugrah both live in Germany, Rohan and Shashwat are from India.

Rohan and Shashwat did not meet Aman and Anugrah in person.

**Q. Are you looking for a cofounder?
** — No.

Q. Company name — Outsight AI.

**Q. Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.*
** — AI Agents to migrate legacy code & fix tech debt.

**Q. Company URL, if any
** — outsight.in

**Q. If you have a demo, attach it below.
** — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99usWUMwsUQ

Embedded: youtube.com/watch

Q. Please provide a link to the product, if any. — https://github.com/OutSightAI/DebtRazor

GitHub - OutSightAI/DebtRazor: Erase Your Technical Debt! 🔪💥

**Q. What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.
** — We will be building AI Agents to migrate Legacy Code and Fix Tech Debt by:

  • Generating Accurate and Comprehensive Documentation
  • Migrating Legacy Codebases and frameworks to latest technologies
  • Significantly Improving the code quality, readability and test coverage

Q. Where do you live now, and where would the company be based after YC? (Use the format City A, Country A / City B, Country B)

— Aman and Anugrah are in Berlin, Germany. Rohan and Shashwat are in Bengaluru, India.

After YC: San Francisco, USA

**Q. Explain your decision regarding location.
** — There’s no better option than San Francisco, USA to base your AI startup. But due to our passports not being strong enough, we cannot immediately move.

There are a lot more enterprise customers in the US compared to other parts of the world.

Progress

Q. How far along are you?
— We have signed two LOIs worth $100K ACV, the first company is a healthcare supplies distributor in India (Relance Medical Solutions) and the other one is a B2B partnership platform (SoundGTM). We have also signed a binding contract of $2000 with Relance Medical Solutions and onboarding them in the next few weeks.

We already have a MVP, a part of that is already open-sourced. (https://github.com/OutSightAI/DebtRazor)

**Q. How long have each of you been working on this? How much of that has been full-time? Please explain.
**— Part-time: 2 months

Full-time: 0

We began working on this idea in June. While we’re not full-time yet, we all have quit our jobs and are serving our notice periods. We will be dedicating ourselves 24x7 by the end of the year.

**Q. Deck
** — https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1q-TBckfNYPFrhntLMZWs38JoxaHeRQ16eoURdsvhLC4/edit?usp=sharing

Embedded: docs.google.com/presentation/d/1q-TBckfNYPFrhntLMZWs38JoxaHeRQ16eoURdsvhLC4/edit

**Q. What tech stack are you using, or planning to use, to build this product?Are people using your product?
** — Tech Stack: Python, LangGraph, OpenAI, Claude

Half a dozen developers and two enterprises are already using our open source repo for documenting their codebase

**Q. Do you have revenue?
** — Yes

**Q. If you are applying with the same idea as a previous batch, did anything change? If you applied with a different idea, why did you pivot and what did you learn from the last idea?
** — We aren’t applying with the same idea.

Reasons to Pivot:

  1. Lack of clear focus
  • I earlier applied with the idea of a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) Chatbot for emotional and mental health support. Due to strict regulations and risk of legal trouble, we couldn’t focus and improve our core offering and instead focused too much on the regulatory side
  • Lack of clear direction also led to co-founder burnout

2. Lack of Domain Expertise

  • Although, you can build domain expertise by continuous learning. I never really took time to build that domain expertise and always assumed that I had the knowledge I needed.

Learnings:

  • Define your ideal customer profile properly and focus on those and solve their problems.
  • Being a domain Expert is necessary. Focus on continuous learning about your domain and don’t assume that you know everything.
  • It’s a marathon and not a sprint. Do things deliberately to avoid burning out. Take hard decisions and stick to avoid burnout issues.
  • Not working full time distracts attention and you can’t really focus on too many different things at the same time especially when your full time job is too demanding. Therefore quitting my job next month.

**Q. If you have already participated or committed to participate in an incubator, “accelerator” or “pre-accelerator” program, please tell us about it.
** — None

Idea

Q. Why did you pick this idea to work on? Do you have domain expertise in this area? How do you know people need what you’re making?

— Each of us in a developer’s capacity has dealt with legacy code and it’s always frustrating to see someone else’s code written 10–15 years ago without any documentation.

I remember at Nuance (now Microsoft), we had this n-gram-based language model written in Perl, a relic from 15 years ago that was still running in production, and every time we had a bug there we literally had to spend the whole day looking into it.

This kind of problem costs both developers and enterprises, in fact software development teams spend 17.3 hrs/week and 50% of the development budget.

We believe we occupy a unique position at the intersection of the problem space (Legacy code) & Solution space (AI). We deal with legacy code pains and fix them everyday in our professional lives, and we have been developing AI solutions for a range of use-cases.

For Example: We have integrated features into EPIC systems and powerscribe (Radiology product with 80% market share in US) dealing with all the legacy code these system have been developed on and we also have members in our team that were core developer of the nursing AI copilot for EPIC systems and fine tuned small models for those reasons.

Another team member of ours is an AI product manager who has previously worked at a consulting firm and has managed multiple legacy code modernization projects.

We have received a lot of organic inbound and interest from enterprises and individuals alike for the product that we are developing and we already have our first paying customer.

Q. Who are your competitors? What do you understand about your business that they don’t?

— Our main competitors include code generation platforms like Devin, GitHub Copilot, Codium, poolside.ai and magic.dev.

These tools primarily focus on generating new code or refactoring small parts of existing code. However, they often overlook the complexities involved in modernizing and integrating legacy code, which is where we set ourselves apart.

While tools like Second.dev have started addressing the challenge of code migration, they are not focusing on the larger issue of legacy languages like C, C++, and COBOL — languages that are deeply rooted in industries like healthcare, banking, and telecom.

These legacy systems present significant security vulnerabilities and are a trillion-dollar problem that requires more than just basic code translation.

Q. How do or will you make money? How much could you make?
(We realize you can’t know precisely, but give your best estimate)
— 1. Partnerships with major consultancies for distribution

2. Pricing: Quarter of Project Cost (Without AI)

3. Path to $100M+: 1000 Customers paying $100k per year = $100M per year

Q. If you had any other ideas you considered applying with, please list them. One may be something we’ve been waiting for. Often when we fund people it’s to do something they list here and not in the main application.

—

  • Fine Tuning LLMs for Legacy Code (This is something that is part of our future vision, but we aren’t focusing on it right now.)
  • Digital Avatars to help with Post Operative Healthcare
  • Studio quality AI tools for music producers as part of their workflows
  • Convert Books & Stories into Movies or Games

Equity

**Q: Have you formed ANY legal entity yet?
This may be in the US, in your home country or in another country.
** — No

**Q. Have you taken any investment yet?
** — NO

Q. Are you currently fundraising?
A. No

Curious

**Q. What convinced you to apply to Y Combinator? Did someone encourage you to apply? Have you been to any YC events?
** — YC has been a dream ever since we became aware of it. Edrizio Delacruz is our advisor and he has encouraged us to apply.

**Q. How did you hear about Y Combinator?
** — Our Adviser Edrizio de la Cruz

Founder Accomplishments

Please tell us about a time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.

Aman — Just at 5 years of age, I noticed that people only showed interest in country flags, only a few days leading up to and on Independence Day.

I observed how the supply and demand affects the price, taking advantage of this, I made a profit of $100 by stockpiling flags when prices were low and reselling during the Independence day when prices were way high

This allowed me to fund both for my and my brothers education for the next one year

Rohan — Had 100% attendance in college without any real attendance by convincing lecturers to let me present monthly recaps of everything taught in class.

Studied on my own + YouTube, nailed everything and got the required attendance on paper.

Spent rest of my time building robots for inter-university competitions

Shashwat — I grew up in a small farming village in India and studied finance at a not-so-famous college. Breaking into software product management as a fresher seemed almost impossible.

But I didn’t let that stop me. I dove into all the top product management books I could find and learned everything I could on my own. Then, I set my sights on ISB, which is often called the Harvard of India.

ISB had a certification program for product management, but it was only for executives with 5+ years of experience, while i was still 20. I reached out to ISB professor Sudhir V. by creatively cold emailing (or spamming) our mutual connects, and after a 7 min call with his assistant, I convinced them that I was real serious and had the grit.

Guess what, I got in! Plus, I got my first job before even receiving the certificate. My pay was 2.5x higher than highest package in my college history.

**Anugrah —**At the age of 14, in my attempt to hlep my blind grandfather. I repurposed the car’s proximity sensor to create a device that helped him navigate the house by himself which greatly improved his quality of life.

With this resounding success, I also organized a charity drive to a local school for the blind, where other volunteers assembled and denoted 150+ such proximity detection canes. A classic success story indeed :)

Please tell us in one or two sentences about the most impressive thing other than this startup that you have built or achieved.

Aman — Bootstrapped a gift shop business with my father that currently generates $50k ARR in Pakistan, while pursuing my bachelors degree full time. My father currently oversees a team of six to seven employees and the business is operated passively.

Rohan — Getting people to talk to you and building lasting relationships.

I have helped/worked with 250+ awesome individuals from all major fields, access to experts is always available, by either someone I know or someone I know, knows someone.

**Shashwat —**I started earning at age of 16, and been supporting my family as a sole bread-earner ever since then.

I started by freelancing as a musician, from niche facebook groups and later via Upwork.

Last year, I started a non-profit NGO with friends & planted 1111 Triveni trees. This got a lot national news coverage

Professionally, i helped transform my ex-CEOs one liner idea to 4 impactful products that contribute to $200k ARR.

Anugrah — Coming from a small village called Kuantan, with a subpar education system, I got a scholarship to an elite high school.

Despite having no background physics and starting three years behind my peers, I claimed the first-place in a national level physics olympiad with my sheer determination and grit.

Tell us about things you’ve built before. For example apps you’ve built, websites, open source contributions. Include URLs if possible.

Aman — MVP Backend built in python for the last startup: https://github.com/agokrani/bbuddy

DeepEval: https://github.com/confident-ai/deepeval (Opensource Contributions)

Worked in the team that rolled out this co-pilot: https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/ai-and-machine-learning/epic-expands-ai-partnership-microsoft-rolls-out-copilot-tools-help

Rohan — Built and sold robotics and mechatronics projects for/to Masters and PhD pursuing students

Shashwat — Managed this project as PM from ideation stage to open-sourcing.

Anugrah —

List any competitions/awards you have won, or papers you’ve published.

Aman —

Rohan —

  • Top in my district (3M+ people) on three separate occasions (exams) and won awards for the same.
  • Won 6 different inter-university robotics competitions
  • I was ranked among Top 30 nationwide, earning a mentorship from leading scientists in India and among top 100 in Physics in the JEE, a national engineering examination.

Shashwat —

  • Scored 9.4 CGPA in 10th Class (School) I scored 108/108 in ISB Product Management Program. (Only 5 people got this)
  • Won “IO Champ” Award in my previous job for my professional contributions : https://shorturl.at/y0Lsv

Anugrah — First Place in the National level Physics Olympiad

p.s. We did not get in, we will come back stronger 💪

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