# CueBench

> CueBench builds reinforcement-learning environments for frontier AI labs, focused on scientific reasoning and performance engineering - the kinds of hard, specialized tasks where the best models still fail more than 80% of the time. The company's bet is that the next gains in model capability will come less from raw pre-training and more from training agents inside carefully constructed environments that force them to learn the things they are currently bad at. Founded in 2026 by Dillon Mehta, Rishan Hemrajani, and Neel Gadde, CueBench is part of Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch and is backed by NVIDIA Inception.

- **Founded:** 2026
- **Headquarters:** San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founders:** Dillon Mehta (Co-Founder & CEO), Rishan Hemrajani (Co-Founder & CTO), Neel Gadde (Co-Founder & COO)
- **Team size:** 4
- **Products:** RL Environments for Scientific Reasoning, RL Environments for Performance / Inference Engineering, Leaderboards
- **Notable:** Accepted into Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch., Backed by NVIDIA Inception., Built demonstrable RL environments for scientific reasoning, including a double-pendulum reconstruction task.

## Products & services

- **RL Environments for Scientific Reasoning** — Reinforcement-learning environments that train and evaluate models on scientific reasoning and experiment design - for example, reconstructing the motion of a hidden double pendulum from a limited measurement budget.
- **RL Environments for Performance / Inference Engineering** — Environments aimed at making models better at inference and performance engineering, a domain where even the strongest frontier models still struggle.
- **Leaderboards** — Public-facing leaderboards that benchmark how models perform across CueBench's environment suites.

## Achievements

- Accepted into Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch.
- Backed by NVIDIA Inception.
- Built demonstrable RL environments for scientific reasoning, including a double-pendulum reconstruction task.

## Latest updates

- **2026-07** — CueBench is part of Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch, with the founding team relocated to San Francisco.

## Links

- Website: https://cuebench.dev
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cuebench

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/cuebench-yc-s26
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-07-31