# Understudy Labs

> Understudy Labs is a San Francisco AI infrastructure startup (Y Combinator S26) that helps data-rich teams replace expensive frontier LLMs with smaller, specialized models they own. Its open-source toolkit captures production traces from existing agent workflows, benchmarks cheaper open-weight models against them, and only ships a replacement once a held-out evaluation beats the incumbent - promising comparable quality at a fraction of the cost and latency.

- **Founded:** 2026
- **Headquarters:** San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founders:** Luis Manrique (Co-Founder & CEO), Aamir Poonawalla (Co-Founder & CTO)
- **Team size:** 2
- **Products:** Understudy (open-source agent tools), Evaluate, Train & Deploy
- **Notable:** Accepted into Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch, Reported 1.13x Claude Sonnet 3.5 performance at ~25% of the cost on a target task, Reported 13% higher eval scores versus Claude Sonnet 3.5 on a benchmarked task

## Products & services

- **Understudy (open-source agent tools)** — An open-source toolkit that installs into the coding agents teams already use to capture production LLM traces, with hosted infrastructure optional.
- **Evaluate** — Benchmarks captured traces to set a success bar, so every future model switch must meet or beat the incumbent in A/B testing.
- **Train & Deploy** — Fine-tunes a smaller open-weight model on prompts and weights the customer owns, starting locally and scaling to the cloud, deploying only when a held-out eval is beaten.

## Achievements

- Accepted into Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch
- Reported 1.13x Claude Sonnet 3.5 performance at ~25% of the cost on a target task
- Reported 13% higher eval scores versus Claude Sonnet 3.5 on a benchmarked task
- Demonstrated 5.2x latency reduction (1.935s to 369ms)
- Reported up to 50x cost reduction on a sentiment-analysis task
- Backed by Instacart co-founder Max Mullen and Gumloop co-founder Max Brodeur-Urbas

## Latest updates

- **2026-06** — Understudy Labs joined Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch and closed initial seed backing.
- **2026-06** — Company operating in private preview with design partners on its open-source capture-evaluate-train-deploy toolkit.

## Links

- Website: https://understudylabs.com
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/understudy-labs
- GitHub: https://github.com/understudylabs/understudy-agent-tools

---

Profile page: https://yespress.io/understudy-labs-yc-s26
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-07-30