Developer tools

Papaya

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

Overview

Papaya is the optimization engine for AI agents. Engineers don't have time to continually improve the agents they've shipped — the context bloat, overly chatty subagents, and broken tool calls sit in production traces nobody reads, quietly hurting agent efficiency. With Papaya they connect their agent directly via SDK, get actionable recommendations on how to improve quality, latency, and cost, and the ones they approve are pushed to production as pull requests.

Papaya runs 200+ research-backed analyses across context, prompts, prompt caching, subagents, and tool calls. Every recommendation is ranked by impact and comes with the production runs that produced it — typically a 20%+ quality improvement on the first workflow analysis.

Company description As recorded 2026-11-08

Founders & team

Macy Mody

Founder/CEO

Co-Founder & CEO at Papaya (YC F26). Previously led GTM and Ops at SafeBase from $0-10M ARR and through its acquisition. Also built analytics products at HqO and managed investments for Amex Digital Labs. UMich undergrad and HBS MBA.

Founder profile As recorded 2026-09-15

Niyaz Puzhikkunnath

Founder/CPO

Founder at Papaya. Previously Sr. SDE at Amazon for several years building large-scale ML systems across Computer Vision, Classification, LLMs/Agents. Led work on brand and product classification, built agent evaluation workflows, and created a self-service ML training pipeline. Earlier, an early engineer at Zovi.com, where he helped build the front-end architecture and internal analytics.

Founder profile As recorded 2026-09-15

Faiz Vadakkumpadath

Founder

Founder at Papaya (YC F26). Previously Senior Data Engineer at Amazon for 10 years, leading teams for the enterprise Data Lake, solving problems at Exabyte scale. Earlier scaled Vodafone's MPESA mobile money system in Africa from 25 to 200 tps at IBM. Co-founded OpenReporting, a SaaS financial reporting tool.

Founder profile As recorded 2026-09-15
3team members reported
Source-reported As recorded 2026-09-15

Founded 2026 · Source

News & product activity

Sources & observations

Y Combinator

Profile depthenriched profile
Website observationwebsite reachable
Last website check2026-11-11
Location · source statedSan Francisco, CA, USA
Pricing evidenceA pricing page was detected
Maturity: Launched · 3 of 6 areas documented

Source-based assessment · automated evidence rules

The company website offers product access through a trial, free start, app download, purchase, or onboarding with existing-account login. Customer adoption is not established by this evidence.

Company website: home Checked 2026-11-08 · Company website: home Checked 2026-11-08

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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 yearpricing page observeddocumentation observedrecent publishing observed