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Barbarik AI
s2024

FOUNDERS
FOUNDER
PROGRESS
COMPANY
CURIOUS
OTHERS
EQUITY
IDEA
VIDEO
Dhiraj Singh (DhirajSingh)

EDUCATION

National Institute Of Technology Sikkim Btech Computer Science '17–'21

WORK EXPERIENCE

Barbarik AI — Co-founder / CEO Nov '23–Present

Building Gen AI decision engine for finance teams.
Saarthi.ai — ML Engineer Dec '21–Aug '23
Developed and led end-to-end handling of the product life cycle for the AI
platform for onboarding lending teams, generating $1.8M in ARR.
Zolvit — Founding team member Apr '21–Dec '21
Developed python-based chatbot on the Rasa framework and scaled it to 1
million users.
Schindler — Business Analyst Dec '20–Mar '21
Led big data projects, processing terabytes of data to drive insights, resulting
in a 20% increase in operational efficiency.
Metamanner Labs — Co-Founder / CEO Aug '19–May '20
As a services company, Metamanner Labs has delivered 27 data science
projects, ensuring exceptional service and value to our clients.

LinkedIn URL
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhiraj-singh-barbarikai

What is your title, or if you haven’t set it yet, main responsibility?* (Required)
(e.g. CEO, CTO, Sales, Engineering, etc.)

CEO

What percent equity do you have?* (Required)

If you haven't incorporated yet, give the equity percent you expect to have.

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60

If accepted to YC, will you commit to working

exclusively on this project for the next year?*
(Required)
(No school, no other jobs)

Yes

Please tell us in one or two sentences about

the most impressive thing other than this
startup that you have built or achieved.
I have successfully built a collection and onboarding
platform for lending teams in Indian languages,
generating $1.8 million in ARR. The platform has
facilitated over 4 million customer interactions, with a
total loan amount exceeding $100 million.

Please tell us about a time you most

successfully hacked some (non-computer)
system to your advantage.
During my second year at NIT Sikkim, my friend
Deepak and I were working on a platform to make
quality study materials accessible to students who
didn't have access to institutions like the IITs and NITs.
We created easy-to-understand lecture videos to
simplify complex subjects, believing that examples are
the best way to learn. This initiative led to the creation
of Learn by Example (h
https://lear nbyexample.in/).

Our project gained traction, and we were invited to

spend two months at IIT Kharagpur. During this time, I
had the opportunity to meet Abhishek and Girija, who
became valuable contributors to our project.
Additionally, I had the privilege of interacting with Prof.
Sengupta, a renowned figure in data science. Our bond
extended beyond academia, as we often played
badminton together, and I even assisted him with
diagrams and synopses for his project.

As our relationship grew, I expressed my desire to

extend my stay at IIT Kharagpur to continue working
on our project and exploring other innovative ideas.
Recognizing my dedication, Prof. Sengupta graciously
issued a formal letter granting me the opportunity to
stay an extra semester, allowing me to further immerse
myself in the world of startups and expand my

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knowledge and network. This experience was truly

transformative, enriching my understanding and
broadening my horizons.

Tell us about things you’ve built before. For

example apps you’ve built, websites, open
source contributions. Include URLs if possible.
- Built collection AI platform for the collection teams
generating $1.8Mn ARR. https://pravid.io/
- Built an annotation tool for data chunking and
labeling used by 10k+ users.
- Successfully built and sold AI assistant to OMNI
hospitals to solve patient-hospital communication.
- Built a Data-washing tool to remove anomalies PII
(Personally identifiable information) from the data set
to be fed to the model.

List any relevant or impressive test scores.

JEE Mains: 99.8 percentile
JEE Advanced: 96.7 percentile
International English Olympiad: 100 percentile
International Mathematics Olympiad: 100 percentile

List any competitions/awards you have won,

or papers you’ve published
Gold Medal in International English Olympiad
Gold Medal in International Mathematics Olympiad
Rashtrapati Awarded Scout
Published papers on ResearchGate:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/
3 1 6 9 2 0 1 1 0 _ I n v e s t i g a t i o n _ o f _ ro l e _ o f _ a l l o y _ m i c ro s t r u c t u re _ i n _ h y d ro g e n -
a s s i s t e d _ f r a c t u re _ o f _ A I S I _ 4 3 4 0 _ s t e e l _ u s i n g _ c i rc u m f e re n t i a l l y _ n o t c h e d _ c y l i n d r i c a l _ s p e c i m e n s

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/
3 2 5 3 7 4 2 1 9 _ C o h e s i v e _ z o n e _ b a s e d _ a x i s y m m e t r i c _ m o d e l l i n g _ o f _ h y d ro g e n -
a s s i s t e d _ c r a c k i n g _ i n _ a _ c i rc u m f e re n t i a l l y _ n o t c h e d _ t e n s i l e _ s p e c i m e n

Vishal Kumar chaudhary (vishalkc9565)

EDUCATION

IIT Palakkad Btech Computer Science '15–'19

WORK EXPERIENCE

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Barbarik AI Private Limited — Data Scientist

Oct '23–Present
- Develop state-of-the-art finetuned LLM
agent leveraging advanced algorithms
and machine learning techniques.
Achieved a 30% increase in accuracy
compared to industry benchmarks. -
Prioritize ethical AI practices, ensuring
fairness, transparency, and accountability.
Developed and implemented ethical
guidelines for LLM. -Implement scalable
infrastructure to handle large datasets and
complex computations. Reduced
processing time by 40% through the
adoption of cloud technologies and
distributed computing.
Corporeal Health Solutions — Data Scientist
Oct '22–Jun '23
Led a team of 20 individuals to conduct
contract risk analysis, concurrently
engaged in disease detection utilizing soft
X-ray imagery to screen for TB,
pneumonia, and breast cancer.
Gyan Data Pvt Ltd — Intern May '19–Sep '22
Cumi: Successfully addressed the Cylinder
Packing optimization challenge, resulting
in cost savings exceeding 25% for the
client on each batch. Nokia: Spearheaded
the development of a Network Parameter
recommendation and Optimization
platform, contributing over 80% of the
coding effort, resulting in a reduction of
over 800 man-hours per day. Worked on
AI security solutions for CRED
Introtuce — Jan '17–Jan '18
-Created Data Annotation tools, Worked
on image segmentation models. -
Developed 10 open-source projects on
Big data.
Microsoft — Jun '16–Oct '17
-Developed frontend web applications

LinkedIn URL

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/
v i s h a l k u m a rc h a u d h a r y

What is your title, or if you haven’t set it yet,

main responsibility?* (Required)
(e.g. CEO, CTO, Sales, Engineering, etc.)

CTO

What percent equity do you have?* (Required)

If you haven't incorporated yet, give the equity percent
you expect to have.

30

If accepted to YC, will you commit to working

exclusively on this project for the next year?*
(Required)
(No school, no other jobs)

Yes

Please tell us in one or two sentences about

the most impressive thing other than this
startup that you have built or achieved.
Built a anonymous chat and image share app as fun
project & scaled to 800+ users within a day which
moved to 4k+ user in a week

Please tell us about a time you most

successfully hacked some (non-computer)
system to your advantage.
Back in my Bangalore days, I was immersed in
hackathons, quietly coding away in the corner. Despite
being more on the introverted side, one particular
experience stands out.

During one hackathon, I found myself hitting a

roadblock in my coding journey. Instead of letting
frustration get the best of me, I decided to take a
break and explore the venue.

As fate would have it, I stumbled upon a team

grappling with a different kind of challenge. They were
struggling with their project's design, and their
determination caught my attention.

Now, I've always had a knack for doodling, scribbling

away in my notebook whenever inspiration struck. So, I

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figured, why not offer my assistance?

I approached the team and timidly extended a helping

hand. To my surprise, they welcomed me warmly, eager
for a fresh perspective. Together, we brainstormed
ideas, sketching them out on a makeshift whiteboard.

Before we knew it, our rough ideas had transformed

into a cohesive design concept. It was unpolished, but
it had potential. And in that moment, I realized the
power of collaboration and stepping out of my comfort
zone.

Tell us about things you’ve built before. For

example apps you’ve built, websites, open
source contributions. Include URLs if possible.
- Built a Chrome Extension that enables users to
remember summary of tabs opened and then use voice
to switch

- Have contribute to open source with 84 repositories

in AI & Data science.

-Built a anonymous chat and image share app with

200K users.

- Developed contract risk analysis software

List any competitions/awards you have won,

or papers you’ve published
Academia
- 99.8 rank (IIT-JEE)
- Scored 1st in global codechef marathon 2019
- Scored 1st in global codechef marathon 2018

Who writes code, or does other technical work on

your product? Was any of it done by a non-
founder? Please explain.
Vishal is responsible for designing all core engineering
architecture and writing the core platform code. I, Dhiraj,
work on the Agent code with two senior developers, who
are core team members on a full-time payroll, and handle
peripheral technical tasks.

How long have the founders known one another

and how did you meet? Have any of the founders
not met in person?
We met at a hackathon called Codefest in Bengaluru in
2019. We quickly bonded over discussions on quantum

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physics and machine learning to solve real-life problems.

Fast-forward to today, we’re best friends and flatmates,
having lived together across three cities in India over the
last four years.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, we collaborated on
projects for fun, including a contract risk analysis tool and a
digital X-ray summarization tool.

Please record a one minute video introducing the

founder(s).
This video is an important part of the application. Read the
Guidelines.

0:00 / 1:20

Company name:
Barbarik AI

Describe what your company does in 50

characters or less.
Accelerate financial decisions with AI copilot

Company url, if any:

https://www.barbarik.ai

If you have a demo, attach it below.

Anything that shows us how the product works. Please limit
to 3 minutes / 100 MB.

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0:00 / 5:35

Please provide a link to the product, if relevant.

https://copilot.barbarik.ai

What is your company going to make? Please

describe your product and what it does or will
do.
Barbarik is developing a Gen AI decision engine for finance
for different roles like CFO, ARM, and Financial Analyst.
Our platform allows enterprise users to onboard domain-
specific use cases, fine-tune and optimize them without IT
or technical intervention, and integrate with the financial
software ecosystem.
We offer features such as access to reliable data in real-
time, quick analysis of trends and variances with interactive
charts, and the ability to drill down into transaction-level
data for hidden insights. Users can create models with
plain-English formulas, build multi-dimensional models 10x
faster, and use AI-powered forecasting and what-if analysis
for better decisions. We provide a flexible approach to
integrations, combining data from any system for useful
and accessible insights.
In addition to traditional RAG techniques, our system uses
a consortium of models to review answers for errors and
improve correctness, reducing 100% of hallucinations. We
utilize fine-tuned and local LLMs for anti-hallucination, text-
to-SQL, language translation, and vectorized embedding,
resulting in up to 96.42% improved accuracy. Our platform
also enables advanced extraction of tables, charts, and
metadata from documents, lowering costs by 4x.
We analyze over 200 billion inferences with sub-second
responses on LLMs and other models, achieving up to a
10,000x improvement in speed. Our platform ensures
security and privacy, with data remaining private and
accessible behind your firewall.
Administrators can limit access to data with roles and
rights, and our platform works across all cloud types and
unstructured data types. With 84% of financial executives
already seeing AI as beneficial for decision-making, we aim
to address the estimated $3.1 trillion yearly cost of poor
data quality due to human error in the US alone.

Where do you live now, and where would the

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company be based after YC?

Bengaluru, India / California, US

Explain your decision regarding location.

Following our participation in YC, we plan to initially focus
on establishing a strong presence in the US market. Once
we've solidified our position and operations here, we will
strategically expand our reach to serve customers on a
global scale.

How far along are you?

We began our prototype journey and crafted our initial
mockups in early November 2023. Surprisingly, after
setting up a basic landing page, we received inquiries from
over 20+ finance professionals by the end of December.
These enterprises had been trying to build their own
internal models but lacked the technical know-how. They
complained that current LLMs alone don't solve business
problems and that existing LLMs face hallucinations, feeling
like a black box to enterprises.
By February 2024, we completed 3 paid POCs and
collaborated with 13 customers, actively shaping Barbarik
through customer feedback and refining platform stability.
By April‘24, we achieved enterprise readiness with all core
services for all platforms running stably.
There’s robust monitoring in place across the infrastructure,
and in-depth usage analytics for all services. The
infrastructure is tested for functional use cases, load
scaling, geo-location scaling, security, unreliable networks,
and a comprehensive list of other test cases, across the
services and supported platforms. We rolled out the stable
beta and are live with 13 customers, serving 50k monthly
minutes of usage.
In April 2024, we won the #1 Gen AI Sparkplug challenge.
We receive an average of 3-5 inbound leads per day (total
250+ so far) and have an outbound pipeline of 100+
enterprises. In Feb’24, we expanded our core team with 2
close friends, NIT grads with 7+ years at Microsoft and
Pharmeasy, in full-time capacity. After successful beta roll-
out responses, we are now focusing on revenue-generating
enterprise customers and partnerships, with 2 integrations
completed and 9 initial conversations progressing towards
integration, worth $1Mn ARR, exploring the US GTM.

How long have each of you been working on

this? How much of that has been full-time? Please
explain.
I and Vishal have been working full-time on Barbarik for the
past 6 months. Two more team members joined us in
February 2024 and have been working for the past 3
months. Together, we have developed the entire
infrastructure spanning approximately 140 repositories,
with around 85 of them open-sourced.

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What tech stack are you using, or planning to

use, to build this product?
Our tech stack comprises Python and Node.js for the
backend, with Next.js for the frontend. We also use large
language models (LLMs) for decision-making, with our in-
house agent built on an open-source LLM, mistral. We've
fine-tuned Mistral on our dataset and added function-
calling capabilities.
In terms of data management, we utilize PostgreSQL for
relational data storage and MongoDB for handling
unstructured data, Our cloud infrastructure is built on AWS.
To drive our AI and machine learning capabilities, we rely
on cutting-edge technologies such as TensorFlow and
PyTorch.
For containerization and orchestration, we use Docker and
Kubernetes. Finally, Git is used for version control.

Are people using your product?

Yes

How many active users or customers do you

have? How many are paying? Who is paying you
the most, and how much do they pay you?
We have 13 active customers using the beta version, all of
whom are paying. Currently, DSPV (CA firm) is our highest-
paying customer, with a deal size of $20K. We have a pay-
as-you-go pricing model with a $500 monthly platform cost
for each user, and we currently have 27 users.

Do you have revenue?

Yes

How much revenue?

Mar 2024: $36,000

Feb 2024: $21,000

Jan 2024: $12,000

Dec 2023: $5,000

Where does your revenue come from? If your

revenue comes from multiple sources (ex.
multiple products, multiple companies or a mix of
consulting and this product), please break down
how much is coming from each source.
All our revenue comes from two sources: the monthly
platform subscription cost and the pay-as-you-go model for
Agent services, which we charge per second.

Anything else you would like us to know

regarding your revenue or growth rate?

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After ensuring platform stability and security in beta, as

we’ve moved to enterprise customers like Nobroker, Bajaj
Finance, Unacademy, and Deloitte, along with partnerships
with a Canada-based financial firm, we're on a healthy track
to hit $1Mn ARR by Q3 CY2024. Additionally, we’re seeing
increasing integration velocity with each integration, and
expect our developer resources to become self-serve soon.

If you are applying with the same idea as a

previous batch, did anything change? If you
applied with a different idea, why did you pivot
and what did you learn from the last idea?
We were very early and were in the process of identifying
our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and gaining clarity on the
business problem. Since then, we have made significant
progress. We have added two more team members and
started generating revenue, which we had not done
before.

If you have already participated or committed to

participate in an incubator, "accelerator" or "pre-
accelerator" program, please tell us about it.
No, we haven’t participated in any incubator program.

Why did you pick this idea to work on? Do you

have domain expertise in this area? How do you
know people need what you're making?
Our decision to pursue this idea was strongly influenced by
personal experiences. While working at saarthi.ai, I
witnessed the time-consuming process of manually
reconciling, resulting in a significant loss of $24k. Research
revealed that due to these manual processes, financial
services firms often lose around $20M per year. Discussing
this with Vishal and Abhay, who had similar experiences at
Zolvit, reinforced the need for a better solution.
We started building this as an internal tool and rolled out a
few early users from my friend circle. We received a very
positive response, with people willing to pay if we could
solve their problems and design their workflow. This early
validation encouraged us to continue developing the
solution, working closely with these users to gather
feedback and improve our offering.
To validate the concept's viability, we engaged with over
50 industry professionals, including accounting firm owners,
partners, and finance teams. After receiving inquiries from
over 20+ finance professionals, these experiences drove us
to seek a solution that would provide tailored insights for
enterprises. Through surveys and discussions, we confirmed
the urgent need for an AI-first solution.
My 4+ years of experience in creating conversational AI
agents for the lending industry, working with banks and
NBFCs, along with Vishal's 5+ years as a data scientist and
Abhay's 7+ years in security layers, provided us with the

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domain expertise needed for this venture.

Who are your competitors? What do you

understand about your business that they don't?
We have two groups of competitors: established players
and rising stars.
Rising stars like Microsoft Colpilot and Vic AI primarily
focus on user interface aesthetics, often neglecting the
critical infrastructure layer. In contrast, we have developed
expertise in robust infrastructure layer engineering. This
allows us to target enterprise accounts effectively, while our
competitors are limited to smaller companies seeking pre-
built solutions. Notably, what our competitors offer as their
core product, we have open-sourced as customizable
sample apps.
On the other hand, established players such as HighRadius
and Blackline rely on legacy technology or is dependent on
OpenAI services. Upgrading to cutting-edge emerging
technology would be challenging for them, given their size
and entrenched systems. It would take them a considerable
amount of time to catch up. This situation presents us with
a window of opportunity and an early mover's advantage.
If we can capture a significant portion of the market during
this window, simply catching up with our technology won't
be sufficient for these legacy giants. They would need to
offer a significantly better solution than ours to regain
market share. We aim to build the requisite war chest at
Barbarik to maintain our competitive edge.

How do or will you make money? How much

could you make?
Our revenue strategy is structured around an AWS-like pay-
as-you-go business model. We charge customers based on
their usage of agent services, measured per second, which
includes cloud costs. Additionally, we have a basic platform
subscription charge of $500 per month per user.
Currently, enterprises rely on analysts to maintain
dashboards connected to their ERP systems. These
dashboards are often numerous, take weeks to build, and
become outdated quickly. They require significant time and
multiple analysts to maintain. Our platform empowers
CFOs by allowing them to chat in plain English and receive
actionable insights directly, eliminating the need for these
manual processes.
Our initial target market is finance teams in US-based
enterprises with a headcount greater than 100. As our
business and technological capabilities expand, we aim to
broaden our target market to include various industries,
account sizes, and geographical regions, starting with the
US. For us, a typical financial services firm or enterprise
with a headcount greater than 100 represents a $500k-
$1Mn ARR account size.

How do users find your product? How did you

get the users you have now? If you run paid ads,
what is your cost of acquisition?
Our 10 enterprise customers right now are qualified
outbound leads through founders' and advisors'

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professional networks, and LinkedIn outreach. 3 from

partnerships with accounting firms. These partnerships
have been instrumental in introducing our product to
potential users and generating pre-qualified leads.
We do get inbound leads from SEO, Website, Razorpay
Marketplace, etc., but these are primarily free or small-
ticket accounts, not fitting our ideal customer profile (ICP)
at the moment. So far, the marketing initiatives and these
case studies serve as a trust data point for enterprise
customers. We expect this channel to increasingly yield
better revenue contribution as we grow.

Where will most of your initial users be located?

US

Which category best applies to your company?

B2B SaaS

Have you formed ANY legal entity yet?

Yes

Please list all legal entities you have and in what

state or country each was formed (e.g. Delaware
C Corp, Mexican SAPI, Singapore Pvt Ltd, etc.).
Barbarik AI Private Limited, India

Please describe the breakdown of the equity

ownership in percentages among the founders,
employees and any other stockholders. If there
are multiple founders, be sure to give the equity
ownership of each founder and founder title (e.g.
CEO).
Dhiraj Singh (CEO): 60%
Vishal Chaudhary (CTO): 30%
ESOPs: 10% (5.5% allocated, 4.5 unallocated)

Are you currently fundraising?

Yes

Please provide any relevant details about your

current fundraise.
We’ve just started discussions with a few Angel investors &
global VCs and have few soft commits. Targeting to raise
$2Mn in seed round in next 3-5 months.

If you had any other ideas you considered

applying with, please list them. One may be

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something we've been waiting for. Often when

we fund people it's to do something they list
here and not in the main application.
No.

What convinced you to apply to Y Combinator?

Did someone encourage you to apply? Have you
been to any YC events?
I’ve been following YC since long & highly admire its track
record, mentorship & thinking philosophy. We’ve seen this
first-hand through our YC founder friends at Infer, Sivi,
ZeoAuto etc.
As we’re stepping into the next stage of our startup
journey, I believe it’s perfect time for us to apply to YC.
With the access to YC’s guidance and extensive network,
we look to rapidly scale our customer acquisition, crack US
GTM, and secure funds from global marquee investors.
We’re excited to join this awesome community and
contribute to its epic story :)

How did you hear about Y Combinator?

Who doesn’t know YC :D

If you have a referral code, enter it here.

NYS24

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