From a Tier 3 city in India, building the infrastructure layer for AI.

We are three engineers from Indore, Madhya Pradesh — not from IIT, not from a startup hub, not backed by an old-boys network. Just three people who got tired of watching AI budgets disappear into a black box with no visibility into why.

Applied — Y Combinator S26

Summer 2026 batch

The Problem We Saw

AI spend is a black box.

Every team shipping Claude or GPT in production faces the same reality: the bill arrives at the end of the month and no one can explain which feature, which engineer, or which prompt pattern caused it.

There is no equivalent of a profiler, no equivalent of a cost dashboard, no equivalent of a lint warning telling you "this prompt is 3× more expensive than it needs to be." Tokenistt is that tool.

Why We Build It

AI should be economically sustainable.

We believe every team — from a two-person startup in Indore to a 500-person engineering org — deserves the same visibility into their AI infrastructure that they have into their database or their cloud spend.

Tokenistt was born from a simple idea: understand the true cost of a single API call before you deploy it. What started as a weekend tool is becoming the observability layer that every AI team will need.

Where we're from

Indore is a Tier 3 city in central India. No VC ecosystem, no IIT campus, no Silicon Valley proximity. Just a city of 3 million people that produces engineers who learn to build because they have no other choice. That's where Tokenistt was written — in laptops, in chai shops, in calls that ran past midnight.

CityIndore, MP 🇮🇳

TierTier 3

Founded2026

StagePre-seed

The Three

Aryan Singh Bhadoria

Co-founder · Chief Executive Officer

Aryan leads Tokenistt's vision, strategy, and growth. He focuses on turning Tokenistt's mission into reality by driving execution, partnerships, and product direction. His goal is to help organizations gain complete visibility into AI usage, costs, and performance while making AI adoption more predictable and efficient.

Aditya Tiwari

Co-Founder · Chief Product Officer & Chief Marketing Officer

Aditya leads product & marketing strategy, user experience, and platform innovation at Tokenistt. He shapes how users interact with the platform — ensuring complex AI cost management and optimization workflows remain simple, intuitive, and actionable. His focus is building products that empower teams to make better decisions around AI adoption.

Akshay Khanna

Co-Founder · Chief Technology Officer

Akshay leads Tokenistt's technology and AI roadmap. He oversees platform architecture, AI systems, and infrastructure — ensuring Tokenistt remains scalable, reliable, and technically ahead of the curve. His focus is building the intelligence layer that helps organizations understand, optimize, and govern their AI spending.

Together, we are three builders united by a shared belief: AI should be accessible, transparent, and economically sustainable. What started as a vision among three founders from a Tier 3 city in India is now evolving into a platform dedicated to making AI usage measurable, predictable, and efficient for teams worldwide.

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