Lamina Labs (YC P26)

You don't need a $2M pre-seed to start building deep tech. When I started building @laminalabs (@ycombinator P26), I had no funding, no team of 10 engineers, and a vision that required serious GPU compute and AI infrastructure. So I did what any desperate founder would do. I cold emailed. I wrote to @agupta , who was building the YC student credits program. I told him I was going all in on building a deep tech project, why it needed serious compute, and the commitment I was putting behind it. I sent that email at 10:50 AM on November 14th. He replied at 10:52 AM. Two minutes. That reply changed everything. Thank you Ankit, that early access was the unlock. From there, it was months of grinding through architecture after architecture. Rewriting core pipelines more times than I can count. Shipping, breaking, rebuilding. Just me, Claude Code, and Codex running in parallel, the closest thing an early founder has to a 10-person engineering team, except they never call in sick. AI coding agents are the single greatest force multiplier available to founders right now. I'm not exaggerating. The leverage is unreal. Here's the thing most people get wrong: you don't need a massive round to get something real off the ground. You need compute credits, the right AI tools, and the willingness to grind through hundreds of iterations until the architecture clicks. If you're a student or early founder sitting on an idea that feels too ambitious, just start. Email the people building the programs. Apply for every credit you can find. Reach out to people you think won't respond. They will. The infrastructure to build serious things as a solo or two person team has never been more accessible. The funding comes after you've already started building something real. Because someone gave me that first unlock, I want to do the same: I'm giving away 5 x $50 Claude Code credits. And whoever ships the best project with that gets $200 in Claude credits from me personally. I know firsthand how much potential $200 in credits has for a builder who's willing to grind. Just comment below with the link to the coolest thing you've built. I will DM you myself.

Leaving MIT to build the next generation infrastructure for animated explainer videos - @laminalabs Last week, my startup Lamina Labs got accepted into @ycombinator (P26). And we’re the first Nepalese team ever accepted. And I became the youngest Nepalese founder to get into YC. Here’s the story. Last summer I started thinking about a simple question: “How can we transform video generation for education?” When I looked around, most tools were doing similar things. There wasn’t much to experiment with that could fundamentally change the problem. Then in October I had a realization. The real opportunity wasn’t just making AI videos. The opportunity was building the infrastructure that makes animated video generation fast, deterministic, and scalable. I realized diffusion-based models will always struggle with long-form videos, they are computationally heavy, expensive, and difficult to keep temporally consistent. So I started experimenting with completely different architectures. After trying multiple approaches, I eventually stumbled on an architecture that made the goal actually possible: physically accurate, deterministic animated explainer videos generated extremely fast and cheaply. Once I saw the potential, I couldn’t stop. Over winter break (about 1.5 months), I basically lived inside the Martin Trust Center and the MIT Innovation HQ, blanket, laptop, whiteboards, locking in day and night building the system and pushing the benchmarks. What started as a side project became Lamina Labs. Around the same time my cofounder @RohanBhattarai_ , who had also been working intensely on his own projects, shared the same vision and obsession for solving this problem. We teamed up and started building Lamina Labs together. And this is only the beginning.