Kimpton AI Joins Y Combinator X26
We are excited to share that Kimpton AI will be a part of the Y Combinator X26 batch.
A little bit of backstory
Mauricio Ortiz and I met 7 years ago at a Goldman Sachs intern event.
We both studied CS and joined Goldman full-time in February 2020. I built algorithms to identify malicious threat actors trying to cyberattack the bank. Mauricio worked on critical infrastructure for the Apple Card.
During COVID lockdown, instead of losing our minds, we spent our time building our own automated trading software. Observability, backtesting, optimization, automated execution. A personal project to manage our own money.
Around the same time, Adrian Del Bosque joined us to help scale our trading systems. Camped out at our apartment for weeks while we built it out together.
Less than a year later, we'd left Goldman with conviction in the idea. Shortly after, at 22 and 21 years old, we were given $10M to manage by a family office.
The age of AI
Then the age of AI came at the end of 2022. We started experimenting with it internally, using it where we could. Nothing was quite agentic yet, but we were paying attention.
By 2025, we were building agentic harnesses to manage time-series data and fragmented data sources the way we actually wanted them managed. We couldn't help but build.
By last summer, the question became impossible to ignore.
Why can't we do for trading what Cursor and Anthropic have done for programming?
Financial markets are unlike any other problem. They're nondeterministic. Chaotic. The information is fragmented across a thousand sources and the future is never guaranteed.
But that's exactly what makes it interesting. The best measure of intelligence has always been the ability to forecast what comes next.
Ken Griffin recently said Citadel is a research firm that monetizes its research through trading. That framing stuck with us. If AI gets good enough to do that research, the whole game changes.
We decided to build the infrastructure for that future. That became Kimpton.
Where we are today
Today, we give investors tools to aggregate financial information quickly and accurately. Proactive visualizations, trade proposals, agentic indicator creation, backtesting.
People are using Kimpton to predict the future, to model risk, to understand the past.
The real promise
Tomorrow, we fulfill the real promise.
No more days staring at screens. No more manually navigating terminals, hunting for an edge nobody else has found, trying to position yourself so future-you makes money instead of losing it to currency debasement or capital loss.
AI should be navigating that information-loaded environment for you. Surfacing the signal. Drafting the recommendation. Seeking your approval.
Programming was disrupted first. Investment research is next.
The next chapter for Kimpton will be in San Francisco. We're very excited to be a part of Y Combinator and could not think of a better foundation to build on.
We're just getting started. More to come.