Saffron

Helping your company find 10x engineers.

2.5Score#514 of 999 agents#12 of 15 in Recruiter

Why it ranks #514

Saffron, an AI recruiter from YC Sp26, ranks #514 of 999 AI agents and #12 of 15 in Recruiter, with a score of 2.5 of 10. Data as of 3 Oct 2026.

The score adds four parts, each 0 to 10, by weight. Every point comes from public evidence. How scoring works ·

Proof 0 × 30% 0.0
Scale 2 × 30% 0.6
Momentum 4 × 25% 1.0
Autonomy 6 × 15% 0.9
= 2.5

Proof
Do customers use it? 30% of the score
0
No public claims of customers or revenue yet.
Not found: revenue or growth (+4), named customers (+3), a customer result (+2), a customer count (+2), work done at scale (+2)
Scale
Is there a real company behind it? 30% of the score
2
3 people.
- +2
  3 people on its YC page3 or 4 people
Not found: funding round in its news (+3)
Momentum
Is it shipping and growing now? 25% of the score
4
Shows a recent launch and a new batch.
- +3
  Launched in the last 6 monthsSaffron: Find Your Next 10x EngineerLaunch YC post · 27 Apr 2026
- +1
  New: YC Spring 2026
Not found: open roles on YC (+2), new traction claim in the last 6 months (+2), funding news in the last year (+2)
Autonomy
How much of the job does it do on its own? 15% of the score
6
Supervised agent: takes actions in other systems; a person approves key steps.
- +6
  Level 2 of 4: Supervised agentTakes actions in other systems; a person approves key steps.
What the model read
- Acts in other systems: 27% likely
- Finishes whole tasks: 12% likely
- Calls itself an agent: 91% likely
- Level 1 from the model's reading of its pages; the evidence review found, with quotes, that its AI acts in the work, so the level is 2
Level 2: Takes actions in other systems; a person approves key steps.

About Saffron

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.