Papaya was founded by Macy Mody, Niyaz Puzhikkunnath, Faiz Vadakkumpadath in 2026.

Who are Papaya's investors?

Papaya's investors include Y Combinator, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greenoaks, Group 11, Insight Partners, Scale Ventures, Tiger Global Management, Workday Ventures.

Where is Papaya headquartered?

Papaya is headquartered in San Francisco, US.

Papaya

YC F26

San Francisco, US · Founded 2026 · 3 employees · 8 known investors

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Papaya is an optimization platform that connects to AI agents via SDK, analyzes production traces across context, prompts, prompt caching, subagents, and tool calls, and delivers ranked recommendations—pushed to production as pull requests once approved—to improve agent quality, latency, and cost. It serves engineers building and maintaining AI agents.

AI & Machine Learning Enterprise Software AIOps B2B Infrastructure AIUnited States of AmericaAmerica / Canada

Founders & leadership· Y Combinator alumni (F26)

Papaya was founded in 2026 by Macy Mody, Niyaz Puzhikkunnath, and Faiz Vadakkumpadath.

Macy Mody Co-Founder & CEOShe previously led go-to-market and operations at SafeBase, scaling it from $0 to $10M ARR and through its acquisition, worked on analytics products at HqO, and managed investments at Amex Digital Labs. She holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Niyaz Puzhikkunnath Co-FounderHe was previously a Senior SDE at Amazon, where he worked on large-scale ML systems spanning computer vision, classification, and LLMs/agents—including brand and product classification, agent evaluation workflows, and a self-service ML training pipeline—and earlier was an early engineer at Zovi.com, contributing to its front-end architecture and internal analytics.

Faiz Vadakkumpadath Co-FounderHe spent a decade as a Senior Data Engineer at Amazon, where he led teams building the enterprise Data Lake at exabyte scale, and earlier worked at IBM scaling Vodafone's M-PESA mobile money system in Africa; he also co-founded OpenReporting, a SaaS financial reporting tool.

Investors · 8

Y Combinatorlisted by Y CombinatorSan Francisco · $500K

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Bessemer Venture PartnersreportedSan Francisco · $50K – $100M

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GreenoaksreportedSan Francisco · $1M – $50M

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Group 11reportedBeverly Hills · $5M – $20M

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Insight PartnersreportedNew York · $120M – $350M

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Scale Venturesreported

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Tiger Global ManagementreportedNew York · $1M – $100M

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Workday VenturesreportedSan Francisco

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Funding

SEC filings, press & company announcements

Undisclosed amountSeries DSep 2021
Source ↗

Source: company announcements and press reports — follow each round's link for the claim.

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Companies working in the same space as Papaya.

Legal entities · 1

corporate structure

Papaya

In the news

Papaya - Continuous Optimization for your AI agentsycombinator.com · Sep 2026

Frequently asked questions

What does Papaya do?: Papaya is an optimization platform that connects to AI agents via SDK, analyzes production traces across context, prompts, prompt caching, subagents, and tool calls, and delivers ranked recommendations—pushed to production as pull requests once approved—to improve agent quality, latency, and cost. It serves engineers building and maintaining AI agents.
Who founded Papaya?: Papaya was founded by Macy Mody, Niyaz Puzhikkunnath, Faiz Vadakkumpadath in 2026.
Who are Papaya's investors?: Papaya's investors include Y Combinator, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greenoaks, Group 11, Insight Partners, Scale Ventures, Tiger Global Management, Workday Ventures.
Where is Papaya headquartered?: Papaya is headquartered in San Francisco, US.