After the demo day of the well-known accelerator’s Winter 2024 cohort, GitRoll watched and gradually narrowed down the list of dozens of companies to select the Top 10 Notable YC Tech Founders.
This list provides information about the founders’ backgrounds, the quality of their code, their contributions to open-source projects, and their influence in the tech sector. The data is sourced from GitHub and GitRoll. Our focus is on those who actively write code and create products. If you’re interested in identifying significant coders, this list includes some of the most notable from YC.
Note: This ranking combines various software engineering domains. Some domains, such as Frontend, might score higher than others, like Full-stack. However, a lower score does not imply inferiority. Comparisons should only be made within the same domain.
Top 10 Notable YC Tech Founders
#10 Robin Seitz: 8.00 Mid-level AI/ML Developer
Who is Robin: Robin, Kater’s co-founder and CEO, is a Magna Cum Laude graduate from UCLA. He has over 8 years of experience in software engineering, having worked at Microsoft, Abbott, and Paragon, with expertise in distributed systems, full stack engineering, and big data.
How is Robin’s GitRoll: A mid-level AI/ML developer, ranks in the top 15% of his field with an A (8.00) rating. Noteworthy attributes include his reliable, secure, clean code following best practices. His clear, maintainable code combined with active contributions to open-source projects demonstrate his moderate influence in the community.
Main opensource contribution: [hyperium/hyper☆13822] A low-level HTTP library for Rust, supporting both HTTP/1 and HTTP/2.
#9 Ismail Pelaseyed: 8.06 Mid-level Full-stack Developer
Who is Ismail: Ismail Pelaseyed, as the CTO and co-founder of Superagent, contributes to the open-source community by providing a framework for developers to create, handle, and deploy AI Assistants. His expertise as a developer is focused on creating open-source software.
How is Ismail’s GitRoll: A mid-level full-stack developer from Sweden, ranked in the top 13%. He’s an active open-source contributor with 12 years on GitHub and 1720 followers. He writes clean, maintainable code, but might have logical and security issues. Despite this, he has contributed to important projects and is influential in advancing technology.
Main opensource contribution: [homanp/langchain-ui☆853] A no-code AI toolkit, LangChain, enables custom chatbot creation, use of external data, and chatbot embedding in any site or application.
#8 Nicholas Khami: 8.18 Mid-level Full-stack Developer
Who is Nicholas: Nicholas Khami, founder-engineer at Trieve and BS Computer Science graduate from The University of Texas, has experience in payment processing and solidity development. In 2021, he interned at NelNet PaymentSpring, managing docker containers, deploying code on AWS EC2, and writing Ruby back-end code.
How is Nicholas’ GitRoll: A Full-Stack Developer with a high-performance rating of 8.18, putting him in the top 10%. He has 9 years of experience on GitHub, has gained 76 followers, and is known for producing reliable, secure, clean, and maintainable code. He has made significant contributions to key open-source projects and has earned recognition and influence as a result.
Main opensource contribution: [DeepSourceCorp/good-first-issue☆2132] An initiative to curate easy pickings from popular projects, so developers who’ve never contributed to open-source can get started quickly.
#7 Raunak Chowdhuri: 8.39 Senior-level AI/ML Developer
Who is Raunak: Raunak Chowdhuri, Co-founder and CTO of Reducto. He received his computer science degree from MIT. Before founding Reducto, he started a computational chemistry company which generates 200k in annual recurring revenue. He has also published papers on computer vision while he was in high school. He is active on Twitter.
How is Raunak’s GitRoll: A senior AI/ML developer ranks top 6% with a rating of 8.39. He has 9 years of GitHub experience and 57 followers. He writes secure, clean code, and contributes to significant projects, but may have minor logical errors.
Main opensource contribution: [langchain-ai/langchain☆82814] A framework for developing applications powered by large language models (LLMs).
#6 Mark Buckler: 8.43 Senior-level AI/ML Developer
Who is Mark: Mark Buckler, CEO of Soundry AI, is curious and ambitious. He applies a first principles approach to various fields, including generative AI, robotics, biomedical imaging, and more.
How is Mark’s GitRoll: A top 6% ranking and 11 years on GitHub, is an applied scientist and open-source contributor with 38 followers. His expertise lies in writing secure and clean code, maintaining code, making significant project contributions, and driving tech advancements.
Main opensource contribution: [endernewton/tf-faster-rcnn☆3643] A Tensorflow version of the faster RCNN detection framework, adapted from the Caffe implementation.
#5 Lukas Martinelli: 8.70 Senior-level Full-Stack Developer
Who is Lukas: Lukas Martinelli, co-founder of Reprompt, spent 7 years as General Manager of Search at Mapbox, serving 2 million developers. After launching Mapbox’s AI assistant, he aimed to simplify AI assistant operations. Prior to Mapbox, Lukas created popular open-source dev tools used by Amazon, IBM, Bosch.
How is Lukas’ GitRoll: A senior full-stack developer with a high rating of 8.70, is one of the top 3% in his field. He is actively involved in open-source projects related to mapping and car distributed systems. With 13 years of experience on GitHub and a following of 401, he is known for producing secure, reliable, and maintainable code, and making significant contributions to influential projects.
Main opensource contribution: [hadolint/hadolint☆9689] A Dockerfile linter that efficiently helps build best practice Docker images by parsing the Dockerfile into an AST and applying rules.
#4 Hayden Housen: 8.81 Exemplary AI/ML Developer
Who is Hayden: Hayden Housen, Co-founder and CTO of Sonauto, is responsible for developing an AI music editor. This editor turns prompts, lyrics, and melodies into complete songs. Housen is a computer science graduate from Cornell University and has prior experience interning with Vocode and Ada’s Machine Learning Team.
How is Hayden’s GitRoll: An AI/ML developer ranks in the top 2% with a rating of 8.81. Expertise in machine learning, NLP, Python, PyTorch, and cybersecurity. Has 9 years of experience on GitHub and 114 followers. Significant contributions include work on unsupervised object discovery, paraphrase identification, and automatic lecture summarization. Developed a widely used text summarization system and authored cybersecurity guides. Pursues cross country running and skiing. Actively involved in NLP, Computer Vision, Deep Learning, and machine learning algorithms, and participates in cybersecurity competitions.
Main opensource contribution: [huggingface/transformers☆124694] Transformers provides pretrained models for text, vision, and audio tasks in over 100 languages. Suitable for various tasks, including text classification and image segmentation, it also manages multi-modal tasks. It offers APIs for downloading, fine-tuning models, and sharing on its hub, with each module being standalone for easy modification. Supported by Jax, PyTorch, and TensorFlow, it facilitates easy transition between them.
#3 Stan Girard: 8.92 Exemplary Full-Stack Developer
Who is Stan: Stan Girard, Co-founder of Quivr, a chat-powered second brain project. An EPITA graduate, he worked in Blockchain before Web3, transitioned to DevOps, and led GenAI in a $100m web dev agency.
How is Stan’s GitRoll: An exceptional full-stack developer respected in the open-source community. Stan excels in writing reliable, secure, and clean code, adhering to best security practices, and producing maintainable code. He’s recognized for significant contributions to key projects and technological advancements.
Main opensource contribution: [StanGirard/seo-audits-toolkit☆527] A free, open-source web app that optimizes your website with features like authentication, customizable access, Lighthouse score tracking, Google ranking monitoring, content keyword identification, link extraction, sitemap URL extraction, text summarization, and security audits.
#2 Aiden Bai: 8.95 Exemplary Full-Stack Developer
Who is Aiden: Aiden Bai, co-founder of Million.js, is a Computer Science student at the University of Washington, on leave to focus on web performance. He enjoys music, fruit tea boba, capybaras, and fishing in Stardew Valley.
How is Aiden’s GitRoll: An acclaimed full-stack developer, Bai ranks in the top 2% on GitHub and top 1% at the University of Washington. Known for secure, reliable code, he has over 6 years of open-source contributions. His notable projects include Million.js, which enhances React’s speed by 70%, Lucia.js, a 3kb JavaScript library, and KBowl, an online platform serving 30+ schools and 1k+ students.
Main opensource contribution: [aidenybai/million☆15178] A high-speed, lightweight compiler that boosts component speed by 70%. It’s compatible with React, improving reconciliation speed by using an optimized virtual DOM to minimize diffing overhead. Essentially, it allows React components to operate at the speed of raw JavaScript.
#1 Ayman Nadeem: 9.01 Exemplary Frontend Developer
Who is Ayman: Ayman Nadeem, CEO of Nuanced, has more than ten years of engineering experience. This includes a significant 7-year stint at GitHub, during which she developed and expanded abuse mitigation infrastructure for over 100 million users. She holds an MSc in Computer Science from Oxford University and an engineering degree from Waterloo University.
How is Ayman’s GitRoll: An exceptional frontend developer. With a 9.01 rating, she is in the top 1%. She codes logically, reliably, and securely. Her code is clean and maintainable. Ayman is recognized in the open-source community and drives technological advancements.
Main opensource contribution: [github/semantic☆8860] A Haskell library and command line tool used for parsing, analyzing, and comparing source code. It supports multiple languages, provides various command line options, and is still under development for some languages.
