Cardinal — Startup Profile

AI Platform for Precision Outbound

HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States | Founded: 2025 | Employees: 2-10 | Stage: Seed | Website: https://trycardinal.ai

About

Cardinal is the AI platform for precision outbound. We run outbound for 40+ YC companies, including Mintlify, Greptile, and Luminai. 'Spray and pray' outbound is dead. The best sales teams operate with extreme precision—finding things in common with customers, monitoring their content, mapping inbound signals, and tracking website visitors. But doing this well means stringing together 10+ tools and hiring a GTM engineer. Cardinal replaces all of that. Our AI agents find hyper-targeted leads, continuously monitor what prospects are posting and engaging with on social media, generate personalized snippets based on shared context, and orchestrate end-to-end outbound workflows across email and LinkedIn.

The Take

Cardinal replaces the 10+ tools B2B startups cobble together for outbound sales (Clay, Apollo, Hunter, Lemlist, PhantomBuster, etc.) with a single AI platform that handles ICP building, lead discovery, signal monitoring, personalized outreach, and sequence orchestration—already serving 40+ YC companies before Demo Day.

Key Metrics

• Total Funding: $5M+
• Last Round: Seed (YC W26 + post-YC round)
• Founded: 2025
• Headcount: 2-10
• Y Combinator Batch: Winter 2026
• YC Customers: 40+

Funding Rounds

• Round: $5M+ (2026-01-01) — Audacious, Burst Capital, Y Combinator

Key People

• Devi Jha
• Jianna Liu

Key Competitors

• Clay —
• Apollo.io —
• Outreach —

Timeline Highlights

• 2026-05-01: Seed Round
• 2026-01-22: YC W26 Launch
• 2025-01-01: Founded

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