# Spine AI (YC S23)

> Spine AI (YC S23) is a San Francisco startup building coordination software for AI agents. Its current product, Medley, is a plugin for Claude Code: you type /mission and Medley breaks the request into a plan, spins up a coordinated team of agents across different models, runs them in parallel with human approval gates, and tracks the whole job on a shared mission board. Founded by Akshay Budhkar and Ashwin Venkatesh Raman, the company argues that a governed team of agents beats any single model working alone.

- **Founded:** 2023
- **Headquarters:** San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founders:** Akshay Budhkar (Co-Founder & CEO), Ashwin Venkatesh Raman (Co-Founder & CTO)
- **Team size:** 7
- **Products:** Medley, Spine Swarm / Canvas, Spine AI Copilots
- **Notable:** Accepted into Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch (S23)., Rebuilt the product three times - copilots, swarm/canvas, and Medley - while keeping the core insight that coordinated agents beat a single model., Shipped Medley as a Claude Code plugin supporting 8+ model families and 50+ tool integrations.

## Products & services

- **Medley** — A plugin for Claude Code. Type /mission and Medley decomposes the prompt into a multi-agent plan, runs agents sequentially, in parallel or asynchronously across multiple model families (Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, Qwen, DeepSeek, Ollama, Llama), integrates 50+ tools (GitHub, Slack, Notion, Jira, Linear, Gmail, Figma and more), enforces human approval gates on sensitive actions, and tracks the whole job on a shared mission board URL. Free to use with existing model access.
- **Spine Swarm / Canvas** — An earlier visual workspace where a described project spins up a swarm of agents working in parallel on an infinite canvas to deliver finished outputs - market reports, financial models, slide decks, interactive prototypes - with reasoning kept visible, inspectable and editable.
- **Spine AI Copilots** — The original product: a platform that turned API docs, database schemas and multi-modal documents into functional AI copilots that companies could embed into their own products with a few lines of code.

## Achievements

- Accepted into Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch (S23).
- Rebuilt the product three times - copilots, swarm/canvas, and Medley - while keeping the core insight that coordinated agents beat a single model.
- Shipped Medley as a Claude Code plugin supporting 8+ model families and 50+ tool integrations.
- Reported competitive benchmark results across Terminal-Bench, HealthBench, ViBench and DrugDiscoveryBench.

## Latest updates

- **2025** — Launched Medley, a /mission plugin for Claude Code that orchestrates multi-agent, multi-model workflows with human approval gates and a shared mission board; opened a waitlist and Discord community.
- **2024** — Pivoted toward visual agent orchestration with Spine Swarm and Canvas - agents working in parallel to deliver finished research reports, models and prototypes.
- **2023-09** — Closed a $500K seed round as part of Y Combinator's S23 batch.

## Links

- Website: https://medley.sh
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/spine-ai
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/Spine_AI

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Last updated: 2026-07-30