Saffron
Saffron is a YC Spring 2026 (P26) company. Based in San Francisco, CA, USA. Team of 3.
About Saffron
Summary
Saffron builds AI-native technical assessments that let engineering teams evaluate how candidates use AI to write code, not just what they produce. Candidates complete tasks on a company's actual codebase inside a browser-based IDE with an AI coding agent, while Saffron captures every decision, distinguishes human-written from AI-generated code, and scores submissions against custom rubrics. This replaces take-home exercises and live pairing interviews that either ignore AI use or cannot measure it.
Business model
Subscription pricing tiers listed on a public pricing page.
Go-to-market
Hiring teams and engineering managers at B2B software companies are the buyers, reached through a self-serve flow where they connect a GitHub repo, define a rubric, and send candidates a single link.
From the Y Combinator listing
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 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.
Facts
- B2B / B2B -> Recruiting and Talent
- San Francisco, CA, USA
- 3
- Active
- Early
Founders (3)
- Jerry Yao
- Kazuma Choji
Score every batch against your own thesis
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