Saffron (YC X26) — Helping your company find 10x engineers
Saffron allows companies to quickly evaluate how well software engineers use AI to code. The way engineers write code has fundamentally changed, but the way companies evaluate them hasn't.
Saffron is a Y Combinator company in the Spring 2026 batch. Its directory entry describes it as: Helping your company find 10x engineers. The founders listed are Robert Chondro (Founder/CEO), Kazuma Choji (Founder/CTO), Jerry Yao (Founder/CPO) (Y Combinator directory entry, March 18, 2026).
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Saffron allows companies to quickly evaluate how well software engineers use AI to code.
The way engineers write code has fundamentally changed, but the way companies evaluate them hasn't. Saffron gives teams full visibility into how candidates use AI agents to build, debug, and ship real features on an actual codebase.
Saffron was founded by Robert Chondro (formerly MIT and Jane Street), Jerry Yao (Stanford and Jane Street), and Kazuma Choji (Harvey Mudd, published in NeurIPS and ICML), and is backed by Y Combinator (P26) and Afore Capital.
Robert Chondro
Founder/CEO
Kazuma Choji
Founder/CTO
Jerry Yao
Founder/CPO
Founders, titles and bios as the company published them. Photographs are our own copies of the ones on that record, so they do not break when the original link expires.
One of 76 companies held here in B2B › Recruiting and Talent.
No investor is drawn from a Form D — the form states how many invested and never who. The one investor on this graph is named because a batch has exactly one.
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Example from a real report (our sample on Target): “In March 2026, Target announced a planned incremental $1 billion operating investment” Source: Target Corporation (press release)
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What the Full Report on Saffron covers
The Short Answer
Which Company This Is
What They Do, And How The Money Works
Who Runs It, And How To Reach Them
The Money: Funding, Valuation, Runway
Who Pays Them, And Who They Are Up Against
Warning Bells
Sources
1 cited source found
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