Two 18-year-olds raise $1.3M to make AI agents pick their clients' software
What's the deal? ManiculeDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a San Francisco-based startup founded by two 18-year-olds from India, has raised $1.3 million in seed funding to help technical companies get their software discovered, recommended, and used by AI agents. Y Combinator and Broom VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → co-led the round, with participation from strategic tech angels. The company calls its model "Agent Relations," or AgentRel.
What's the endgame? Manicule restructures API documentation, technical content, and authentication flows so large language models recommend a client's platform — and so AI agents can autonomously sign up, test, and run tasks inside the product. It positions this as execution rather than reporting, contrasting itself with AI visibility tools that only monitor where brands appear in LLM answers.
Why now? Software buyers are shifting from Google queries to prompts in ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI Overviews. "The fundamental unit of software discovery has shifted from the Google search query to the AI prompt," said co-founder and chief executive officer Naman Bansal.
The track record: Manicule builds on earlier work with developer-tool companies including Greptile, ReductoDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and SupermemoryDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. For Supermemory, it rebuilt the documentation and reported a 37% increase in answer success rate. The company says it grew to $53,000 in monthly revenue and claims its AI-plus-human model lets a lean team operate at five times the capacity of traditional agencies.
What's next? The capital will fund core engineering, internal agent automation, and more technical account capacity. Manicule is initially targeting the $170 billion developer tools market, with plans to expand across broader software categories.
What could go wrong? Larger rivals are better capitalised: AI-visibility platform Profound raised $96 million in February 2026 and BluefishDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → raised $43 million in April, though both focus more on measuring brands' presence in AI answers. Whether customers will pay for agent discoverability and onboarding as a distinct service remains unproven.
The signal: At $1.3 million, Manicule's seed sits in roughly the 27th percentile by size — modest against the sector's bigger raises. But the bet is bigger than the cheque: that AI agents, not human searchers, will become the main gateway to software discovery, and that execution will decide who gets chosen.
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Image credit: Generated with Gemini
