Cold outbound used to be simple. Find a list, send enough emails, and hope somebody replies. That playbook is breaking fast. Buyers ignore generic outreach now, while sales teams spend hours juggling tools just to make outbound feel personal. Cardinal thinks AI agents can fix that.
The startup is building what it calls an AI platform for precision outbound. Instead of relying on mass email blasts, Cardinal helps companies identify highly specific leads, track customer signals, monitor online activity, and automatically build workflows that normally require dedicated GTM engineers.
That approach is already catching on inside YC. Cardinal says it currently powers outbound for more than 40 YC startups, including Mintlify, Greptile, and Luminai. The founders believe modern outbound no longer works when every message looks the same.
Behind the company are Devi Jha and Jianna Liu, two founders returning to Y Combinator for a second time. Their previous startup, Leafpress, focused on energy software and was eventually acquired by Johnson Controls. Before that exit, they used cold outbound themselves to land companies like Lindt and Honeywell.
That experience shaped Cardinal directly. While building Leafpress, the founders saw how strong outbound teams operated differently from everyone else. The best teams tracked customer signals constantly, mapped inbound activity, monitored social engagement, personalized messaging deeply, and stitched together large workflow systems behind the scenes.
The problem was that doing all of that manually required too many tools and too much operational work. Cardinal wants AI agents to handle those workflows automatically instead.
The platform can map entire target markets, enrich attendee lists for conferences, monitor what prospects post online, capture signals from website visits and ad campaigns, and generate highly specific snippets based on shared context between teams and customers. It also builds outbound workflows across email and LinkedIn automatically.
That shift reflects something larger happening across sales. Founders increasingly care less about sending more emails and more about sending smarter ones. Precision is replacing volume, especially as buyers become harder to reach through traditional outbound tactics.
Devi studied computer science at Harvard before dropping out, while Jianna graduated from MIT and previously worked at Meta, DoorDash, and Nvidia. Together, they are now betting that AI agents will become a core part of future sales organizations, not just productivity add-ons.
Cardinal joined Y Combinator as part of the Winter 2026 batch and is building from San Francisco. While many AI startups focus on replacing work entirely, Cardinal is focused on something more immediate: helping sales teams finally stop guessing who to reach, when to contact them, and what to say.
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