Cyberdesk

Alumni Q&A

How did your company get started? (i.e., How did the founders meet? How did you come up with the idea? How did you decide to be a founder?)

The two founders met about two years ago through a shared connection to Rice University and both lived at the Incepto hacker house in Menlo Park. They started Cyberdesk after finding that building a reliable, fast, and affordable computer use agent was difficult, built their MVP in six days, and landed a paying customer the following day via a cold email.

How did you decide to apply to Y Combinator? What was your experience applying, going through the batch, and fundraising at demo day?

The founders decided early on to apply to Y Combinator together. They began working roughly a month before the Summer 2025 deadline, launched, secured paying customers, and built out their infrastructure, then interviewed in person and were accepted the same night.

What's the history of your company from getting started until the present day? What were the big inflection points?

The founders began working together in late March 2025 with an initial product that let developers spin up virtual desktops for computer use agents in a single line of code; they shipped an MVP in five days and got a paying customer the next day, but found companies already had their own VM infrastructure. After talking to over 100 developers in the computer use and RPA space, they pivoted to a layer on top of computer use agents that memorizes previously completed tasks and repeats them 3-5x faster and more cheaply, falling back to computer use during popups and anomalies. They built the new MVP in a week, landed their first pilot a week later, and have since signed customers in healthcare, construction, and accounting.

What is the core problem you are solving? Why is this a big problem? What made you decide to work on it?

Automating legacy desktop apps with poor APIs typically forces developer teams to build brittle scripts in Python or legacy RPA tools like UiPath, or to hire remote workers to operate remote desktops, with maintenance costs rising as more software and versions must be supported. The founders note that repetitive manual desktop work is widespread and that AI agents increasingly need to operate desktop apps to complete full human workflows.

What is your long-term vision? If you truly succeed, what will be different about the world?

The founders point to robotic process automation as a $6 billion industry that covers only a small share of automatable desktop tasks, and aim for their agent to eventually automate every manual computer task.