Adhityaa Chandrasekar wants to see every request your server ever makes

Every backend engineer knows the feeling. A request fails in production, the logs say almost nothing, and the next few hours disappear into guesswork. Adhityaa Chandrasekar spent long enough on the inside of large-scale infrastructure to decide that this was not a law of nature. It was a missing tool. So he built one and called it Subtrace.

The pitch is disarmingly plain. Subtrace is, in his words, "like an inspect element button for your whole backend." Start a process with it, and you see every HTTP request coming in and going out, in real time - the payload, the headers, the latency, the status code. No SDK to wire up. No code to change. No root privileges to beg for. One command, and the black box turns to glass.

The OriginWhat Google teaches you about seeing

Before Subtrace, Adhityaa was a software engineer at Google, working on Kubernetes internals and the infrastructure monitoring behind GKE, the company's managed Kubernetes service. It is hard to imagine a better classroom for the problem he would later take on. Monitoring at that scale is not a feature you bolt on at the end. It is the difference between an outage that lasts minutes and one that lasts a weekend.

That experience left a mark. The tooling that engineers get for the browser - open DevTools, click a request, read everything about it - simply does not exist for the servers those browsers talk to. The frontend has X-ray vision. The backend has a flashlight and a stack of logs.

"You'll see every HTTP request coming in and going out in realtime."

The MachineryeBPF, the quiet superpower

The reason Subtrace can watch without disturbing comes down to a piece of kernel technology called eBPF. It lets a program observe what a system is doing - the packets it sends, the calls it makes - without changing the application or handing over root. That "without" is the entire product. It is what makes Subtrace a single command instead of a migration project.

There is a philosophy hiding in that architecture. The best developer tools tend to disappear. They ask for nothing, they sit out of the way, and they show up exactly when you need them. Subtrace is built on the belief that visibility should be the default state of a system, not a project you schedule for next quarter.

The PatternHe has done this before

Subtrace is not the first time Adhityaa built the thing he wished existed and then gave it away. Years earlier he created Commento, an open-source, privacy-first comments platform for people who wanted an alternative to the heavier, ad-laden options. It collected more than 3,800 stars on GitHub - proof that a lot of other developers had been quietly wishing for the same thing.

The through-line across his work is consistency of taste. Whether it is a comments widget or a network tracer, the projects share a preference for tools that are lightweight, self-hosted where possible, and honest about what they do. His personal site, adtac.in, reads the same way - essays on Go worker pools, double-entry accounting, OpenPGP, and the small art of using JavaScript inside a Makefile. It is the reading list of someone who enjoys the foundations, not just the frameworks.

The PartnershipA friendship, then a company

Subtrace is a two-person operation, and the two people go back a long way. Adhityaa co-founded the company with Sachin Sridhar, who leads engineering as CTO and came from Microsoft, where he worked on Power BI and Microsoft Fabric. The two have known each other for more than a decade, since their undergraduate years at IIT Madras. Adhityaa's own path ran from IIT Madras to the University of Waterloo and then to Google before it looped back to a founder's desk.

Debugging that once took months, the company says, can now take minutes.

The TimelineHow he got here

• IIT Madras → Waterloo
  Studies in computer science; the systems instinct takes root.
• Open source
  Builds Commento, a privacy-first comments platform with 3.8k+ stars.
• Google
  Software engineer on Kubernetes internals and GKE infrastructure monitoring.
• 2024
  Founds Subtrace with Sachin Sridhar.
• 2025
  Subtrace joins Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch and raises a seed round.

The BetMaking the backend inspectable

Ask what Subtrace is really selling, and the honest answer is not a dashboard. It is a feeling - the same casual confidence you have when you open DevTools on a webpage and just look. Adhityaa's wager is that engineers should have that same reflex for the systems behind the page. That visibility should not require instrumentation, an onboarding call, or a permission slip from the kernel.

It is an unglamorous problem, which is exactly why it is a good one. Nobody wakes up excited about network tracing. But everybody who has lost an afternoon to a request they could not see understands, instantly, why someone would build this. That understanding is the whole market. The rest is shipping - one command at a time.