Aakash Mahalingam is the cofounder and CEO of Canary (YC W26), a startup building an AI QA engineer that reads your source code to catch broken user flows before they hit production. Before Canary he built Windsurf's enterprise product and helped push its self-serve plan to roughly $20M ARR in six months. An ICPC APAC finalist with earlier stints at AWS and Morgan Stanley, he now works out of Mountain View on the problem of testing keeping pace with AI-accelerated coding.
Rachel Schneider is the founder and CEO of Canary, a New York fintech that lets employers and donors give tax-free emergency cash grants to workers in crisis. Before building software, she spent years studying how American families actually handle money - co-authoring the acclaimed book The Financial Diaries with economist Jonathan Morduch - and held senior roles at Merrill Lynch, the Aspen Institute, and the Financial Health Network. Canary turned that research into a product: a confidential application that moves money to people at the moment they need it most.