Superserve, a three-person Y Combinator startup, says the virtual machines it builds for AI agents are now running more than 100,000 machines a week. According to Superserve's company-submitted YC profile, teams including the AI assistant maker Lindy and Y Combinator itself use the service. Lindy's use is supported by public posts; independent confirmation that Y Combinator is a user was not found. The machines are pausable Firecracker microVMs, lightweight virtual machines that can be frozen and revived on demand.
The figure comes from Superserve's own YC company profile, published in October 2026. It is company-submitted, and no third-party audit turned up in the research for this article.
The problem Superserve is chasing is easy to state. Agents that work for days or weeks need a place to keep their files, running processes and memory, and containers or sandboxes tied to a single request were never designed for that. Superserve's bet is a dedicated virtual machine for each agent, one that sleeps at no cost and wakes when called.
What Superserve built
The company's tagline is "Virtual machines for long-horizon agents." According to its YC page, machines start from templates in under 50 milliseconds and can pause with memory and files intact, at zero compute cost. They can also run Docker and databases, the page says, along with full browsers.
Security is handled separately from the machine itself. Superserve says a broker holds API keys outside the VM, and outbound network traffic is blocked unless explicitly allowed. Its site also lists snapshot and fork features, an SDK and API, support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and compliance postures covering SOC2, HIPAA and GDPR. The product is open source and can be self-hosted, according to the company, which maintains a public GitHub organization called superserve-ai.
Who is behind it
Pavitra Bhalla is founder and chief executive. His YC profile lists time as a staff software engineer at Dosu, which builds code-reasoning agents used by 200,000 engineers, including teams at HashiCorp and Datadog as well as LlamaIndex. Earlier, he was a founding engineer and later director of engineering at Long-Term Stock Exchange (YC S17).
Superserve was founded in 2025. A founder post points to a pre-seed round from Open Core Ventures, though no amount has been disclosed. Dealroom, a startup data directory, lists a $125,000 YC investment in September 2026 and treats it as a standard batch deal. Dealroom is a compilation rather than an announcement, so the company has not confirmed that figure.
