Sentient OS
New accelerator entry · 2026-08-24 · the record
In their words
Nobody's built truly proactive AI, because it requires running inference on your entire life. In the cloud, that's insanely expensive and a privacy nightmare. But not on your own chip. Every night, Sentient's on-device LLM wakes your Mac and understands what's new in your life (email, messages, files, Granola transcripts...), entirely locally, and distills it into a knowledge base. You wake up to your work already prepared: the reply you forgot, drafted from your own context; the subscription you never use renewing tomorrow, caught; the report you promised in the group chat, ready to send. Everything is one click from firing through computer use, and nothing fires until you click. Or click your Mac notch anytime and say "finish this for me." Sidekick takes over the thing you were doing with its own cursor while you move on. On-device inference at this scale was supposed to be impossible: devices too slow, and models too dumb. So we built the stack ourselves: a custom LiteRT-LM fork (KV-cache reuse, speculative decoding, custom k-quants) that runs nightly on 8 GB Macs. The user's hardware does ~90% of the compute, and their own ChatGPT or Claude subscription does the rest, so our marginal cost is ~$0, and our servers store nothing. We soft-launched late July with one Reddit post: top of r/macapps, 2,000+ users in 48 hours, $0 marketing. Free and open source for consumers; the same engine on the work stack (Slack, Granola, Linear, Notion) becomes the enterprise business.
What the record says
Most-starred repository: sentient-os — 481 stars, Swift.
Counted 2026-09-05 across repositories the account owns; forks are excluded.
Founder & CEO, Sentient OS (YC F26). Top 12 AI dev on GitHub at 18. Featured in WIRED & 40+ publications, twice: - Hacked iPadOS onto the iPhone 17 Pro via a bootrom exploit (1M+ views). - Writing Tools, my open-source writing assistant that beat Apple Intelligence to market (30K+ users, 2.4K+ stars). On-device inference nerd since high school; AIM India's expert voice on Apple's MLX. Building on-device AI that understands your entire life and proactively finishes your work with computer use.
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.
Against the 29 companies on file from Fall 2026. Median team 2, largest 6.
The nearest companies on file from the same batch, side by side with this one.
| Company | Batch | Sectors | Listed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dreamscale Labs | Fall 2026 | Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Infrastructure | 2026-09-05 |
| Sinter | Fall 2026 | 3D Printing, Manufacturing, Advanced Materials | 2026-09-05 |
| Hopper | Fall 2026 | Infrastructure, AI | 2026-09-04 |
| OnePatch | Fall 2026 | DevOps, Automation, AI | 2026-09-03 |
| Orca Aerospace | Fall 2026 | AIOps, Space Exploration, Satellites | 2026-09-02 |
| Sentient OS (this page) | Fall 2026 | Artificial Intelligence, Productivity, AI | 2026-08-24 |
Click a column heading to sort. Comparison is against records held here, not against every company that exists.
The full profile
The rest of this profile is open on any paid or trial plan
It costs no credits. It is a plan check and nothing else.
- Source Check — verify Jesai Tarun's other claims against the registers that hold them.
- INVEST — compare this company against the peers above, on the numbers.
- RECRUIT — see who is already on the team.
- Press Requests — connect with Jesai Tarun for a story.
You land back on this company when you are in.
Not ready to upgrade? Keep this one in view instead.
Watchlist Sentient OSYou get an alert in MentionFox the next time this company shows up.
Is this you?
If you're behind Sentient OS: acceptance into a YC batch is one of the few weeks a young company gets looked up by people who matter — investors, other founders, press. FoxPlug turns the commits, deploys, and releases you're already making into that story automatically, so anyone who looks finds something current. FoxChat puts a guide on your own site so the people YC's own page just sent you don't read one line and leave.
Sourced from the company's Y Combinator directory entry and from the public GitHub account that record links to (Sentient-OS-Labs). Figures are read directly from the source record; names have not been matched against other people.
