# Crustdata Raises $6M Seed and Reaches $4M ARR Building Live Data APIs for AI Agents **Author:** Zero G Talent **Published:** 2026-11-05 **Category:** software **Tags:** yc-hiring, b2b software, machine learning, data engineering, software engineering [Read on Zero G Talent](https://zerogtalent.com/blog/crustdata-raises-6m-seed-and-reaches-4m-arr-building-live-data-apis-for-ai-agents) --- [Crustdata](https://zerogtalent.com/ai-companies/crustdata) raised a $6 million seed round and reached profitability after growing annual recurring revenue from $770,000 to over $4 million in seven months, operating with a single-person sales team and zero outbound marketing spend. Reported by [Pulse 2.0](https://pulse2.com/crustdata-6-million-seed-funding-closed-for-building-data-layer-for-ai-agents/), the round was led by Y Combinator and A Capital, with participation from General Catalyst, SV Angel, and Phosphor Capital. The San Francisco-based company builds real-time data infrastructure designed specifically for autonomous systems. While traditional B2B intelligence platforms crawled the web periodically for human users browsing search results, Crustdata operates continuous live web crawlers to supply fresh, structured company and people records directly into AI pipelines. ## Web Data Structured for Autonomous Systems Crustdata positions its platform as a gateway connecting autonomous software to live web sources. Traditional data vendors rely on cached databases that quickly become stale, forcing outbound sales representatives or recruiters to verify information manually. In contrast, Crustdata's continuous crawlers monitor business web changes as they happen, delivering structured company records, executive movements, and hiring signals through APIs. Software teams use the service to feed autonomous sales development representatives, recruiting systems, and automated investment sourcing pipelines. Customers track emerging prospects, founders, and job candidates before those entities register across legacy databases. Early enterprise and production deployments include: - Y Combinator, which uses Crustdata to source and recruit startups for its accelerator batches. - HubSpot founder Dharmesh Shah, who uses the data layer for agent.ai. - Ryan Reynolds' software company MNTN, which uses Crustdata to automate and prioritize outbound sales pipeline generation. ## Robotics Engineering Meets B2B Intelligence Crustdata was founded in 2024 by [Abhilash Chowdhary](https://zerogtalent.com/people/abhilash-chowdhary), [Chris Pisarski](https://zerogtalent.com/people/chris-pisarski), and [Manmohit Grewal](https://zerogtalent.com/people/manmohit-grewal). Chowdhary and Pisarski connected in 2023 through Y Combinator's co-founder matching platform before bringing Grewal onto the founding team during YC's Fall 2024 batch. Chowdhary, who serves as CEO, previously led the robotics group at Postmates X and stayed through its acquisition by Uber. He also served as a founding engineer at Robotwits, an autonomous driving spinout from Carnegie Mellon University acquired by Waymo, and worked on the early engineering team at Serve Robotics from inception to its public listing. Before working in autonomous systems, Chowdhary built petabyte-scale data pipelines at Yahoo. Pisarski provides commercial and data intelligence domain expertise. He served on the founding team and later as interim CEO, head of product, and head of sales at PrivCo, a venture-backed private company financial data platform. Grewal, a Northeastern University computer science graduate, previously founded and sold multiple data products serving point-of-sale platforms and direct-to-consumer software businesses. ## Bootstrapped Momentum and Technical Expansion The company reached profitability ahead of its institutional seed round by dogfooding its own data APIs to identify and close customer accounts. Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan noted that YC invested after becoming an active customer: "We were so impressed with the founding team and how quickly they’ve made inroads with B2B customers that we hired them to source and deliver data to help us find and recruit startups to join YC." With fresh capital and accelerating enterprise adoption, Crustdata is expanding its core engineering footprint in San Francisco and Bengaluru. The technical roadmap centers on scaling crawler throughput, structuring unstructured web documents, and reducing API response latency for agentic workflows. To expand platform capacity, Crustdata is hiring a [Senior Data Platform Engineer](https://zerogtalent.com/ai-jobs/crustdata/senior-data-platform-engineer-82761) to manage high-volume extraction pipelines, alongside a [Founding Product Engineer](https://zerogtalent.com/ai-jobs/crustdata/founding-product-engineer-79859) responsible for developer interfaces. On the algorithmic side, the team is bringing on a [Founding ML Engineer](https://zerogtalent.com/ai-jobs/crustdata/founding-ml-engineer-91923) in San Francisco and an international counterpart in India to build extraction and entity-resolution models. ## Open Engineering Roles Crustdata employs 20 people and lists seven open technical positions across San Francisco and Bengaluru. All listed roles are onsite. | Role | Location | Work Mode | Salary | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | [Founding ML Engineer](https://zerogtalent.com/ai-jobs/crustdata/founding-ml-engineer-91923) | San Francisco, CA, US | Onsite | $150,000 – $300,000 / year | | [Founding Product Engineer](https://zerogtalent.com/ai-jobs/crustdata/founding-product-engineer-79859) | San Francisco, CA, US | Onsite | $200,000 – $250,000 / year | | [Founding Forward Deployed Engineer](https://zerogtalent.com/ai-jobs/crustdata/founding-forward-deployed-engineer-84528) | San Francisco, CA, US | Onsite | $150,000 – $200,000 / year | | [Senior Data Platform Engineer](https://zerogtalent.com/ai-jobs/crustdata/senior-data-platform-engineer-82761) | San Francisco, CA, US | Onsite | $140,000 – $200,000 / year | | [Founding ML Engineer (India)](https://zerogtalent.com/ai-jobs/crustdata/founding-ml-engineer-india-92052) | Bengaluru, KA, IN | Onsite | ₹7,000,000 – ₹18,500,000 / year | | [ML Engineer Intern \| Summer 2026](https://zerogtalent.com/ai-jobs/crustdata/ml-engineer-intern-summer-2026-92163) | San Francisco, CA, US | Onsite | $8,000 – $14,000 / month | | [Software Engineering Intern (Forward Deployed) \| Summer 2026](https://zerogtalent.com/ai-jobs/crustdata/software-engineering-intern-forward-deployed-summer-2026-89156) | San Francisco, CA, US | Onsite | $4,000 – $8,000 / month | [See all open roles at Crustdata](https://zerogtalent.com/ai-companies/crustdata) --- *Source: [Zero G Talent](https://zerogtalent.com), the job board for space, defense, AI, robotics and frontier-tech companies.*