Kushal Byatnal
Summary · queued
Co-founder and CEO of Extend — the document processing cloud, rebuilt around language and vision models instead of legacy OCR. The company is profitable, ranked first on RealDoc-Bench at 95.7% field-level accuracy, and backed by $17M in funding led by Innovation Endeavors.
Ten years of the same pattern: join before it's obvious — Brex at fifteen people, Stir at zero, Extend at day one — then stay for the part where the software has to work for everyone, every day, at scale.
Experience · queued
Extend · Co-founder & CEO · YC W23
Parses the documents that break everything else. Brex, Flatiron Health, Square, and Checkr run mission-critical pipelines on it; revenue grew 15× in a year and page volume 100× since founding.
Stir · Co-founder & CTO
The financial layer for creators. Scaled to hundreds of millions in payment volume; seed led by Homebrew with Casey Neistat and Chad Hurley.
Brex · Early engineer → Technical Lead
Joined around employee fifteen; built across card and cash as the company scaled past six hundred people.
Google & Amazon Robotics · Engineering
NLP and query understanding on Google Ads; computer vision for Amazon's fulfillment floors. BS in Computer Science, Duke.
Verified figures · queued
| Field accuracy at Brex, across millions of production documents | 99% |
| Six months of Flatiron Health's manual work, replicated in | 2 weeks |
| Hardest recorded parse — one 91-page degraded scan, zero errors | 10,400 fields |
| ARR closed from a single post about PDFs | 6 figures |
| Paid for the extend.ai domain, announced without ceremony | $50,000 |
Operating principles · queued
- Code is cheap; outcomes are expensive. The cost of writing software keeps falling. Deciding what to build, shipping it, and keeping it alive does not.
- Accuracy is a product, not a demo. A clean invoice is a party trick; the degraded scan at 2 a.m. is the business.
- Hire for what the résumé can't hold. Thirty interviews to find one founding AE — the one who genuinely loved the game. 100× since.
- Distribution is the founder's job first, and it stays on the founder's desk until it can't be.
Contact · queued