Manufacturing industrial

Poka Labs

Website
Founded 2023Origin source ↗Checked 2026-09-15

Overview

Poka Labs builds AI agents for pricing and sales at industrial manufacturers. Manufacturers sell thousands of products, and most customer requests are still priced by hand: reps search the catalog, check past prices and chase approvals while the customer keeps shopping.

Poka's costing, pricing, quoting and follow-up agents share one view of each manufacturer's products, customers and deal history from their ERP, CRM and email. Sales teams answer requests faster and price consistently across every customer.

Malay and Andrew met during their MBAs at Harvard Business School. Poka works with manufacturers ranging from a few million to billions of dollars in annual sales.

Company description As recorded 2026-11-08
LinkedIn Pricing About
Manufacturing industrialAI agentBusinessesMid marketSubscription

Founders & team

Malay Shah

Founder/CEO

Malay is the Co-Founder and CEO of Poka Labs. He earned degrees in Chemical Engineering and Economics from NC State and an MBA from Harvard Business School. With a background in the specialty chemicals industry, Malay has held various positions in operations and engineering working across plants in US, Germany, and China. His work in deploying chemical expertise with advanced analytics has saved his previous employers tens of millions of dollars.

LinkedIn
Founder profile As recorded 2026-09-15

Andrew Bass

Founder/CTO

Andrew is the Co-Founder and CTO of Poka Labs. Before Poka, he worked on critical data infrastructure systems at Meta, as well as optimization software at a Series A startup (acquired) that helped mobility companies boost their revenue 40%. He has both an MBA and MS degree at Harvard where he focused on ML systems.

LinkedIn
Founder profile As recorded 2026-09-15
5team members reported
Source-reported As recorded 2026-09-15

Founded 2023 · Source

News & product activity

Sources & observations

Y Combinator

Profile depthverified profile
Website observationwebsite reachable
Last website check2026-11-11
Location · source statedSan Francisco, CA, USA
Pricing evidenceNo pricing page confirmed
Maturity: Operating · 3 of 6 areas documented

Source-based assessment · automated evidence rules

The company website explicitly reports customer or user adoption. This is a source-based assessment of a company claim; scale and revenue are not independently verified.

Company website: home Checked 2026-10-12

Trusted by teams at

Maturity is an evidence-based assessment, not a success rating. It may understate the current stage where evidence is limited. Coverage records documented areas, not a complete or independently audited company history.

Stage definitions
independent websitesource corroborationreachable websitedescriptive evidenceclassified market and modelsourced peoplesourced founding year
startup.observe Directory coverage · Sources & method