The Idea:

In 2022, Agnay Srivastava left Mumbai for the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Indiana, expecting his coding skills to carry him into a US internship. Then hiring froze. He fired off somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000 internship applications and got roughly 10 to 12 callbacks.

Two years later, Pulkit Gupta arrived from Jaipur. He’d been coding since 13 and had built a language app with over a million downloads by 17. It didn’t matter. He was sending 10 applications a day and losing three to four hours to it, with nothing predictable to show for the effort.

The pair met at a friend’s dinner in 2024 and bonded over the same grind: retyping the same resume into the same Workday forms, as international students in a market that only wanted senior hires.

So they built the thing they wished existed. An agent that finds the jobs, rewrites the resume and hits submit.

This was the beginning of Tsenta.

The Execution:

• April 20, 2026: After winning two categories at a 36-hour Georgia Tech hackathon and picking up a referral from YC founders they met there, the pair are accepted into YC’s Summer 2026 batch with $500K. Agnay is a senior, Pulkit a sophomore.
• June 2026: Tsenta starts YC at roughly $15K MRR. Users jump from about 1,100 to nearly 8,000 in two months, and Indian press runs the ₹5 crore YC cheque as a headline.
• Summer 2026: Instead of generic UGC, they pay creators whose audiences already trust them, pairing upfront fees with aggressive affiliate payouts so the best creators keep posting. Many reach the Indian expat communitiesthe founders came from, and every campaign brings a flood of brutally honest feedback.
• July 31, 2026: Tsenta’s Launch YC post claims 45,000+ users, with over 70% of paid users landing interviews at names like Goldman Sachs, NVIDIA and SpaceX.
• August 2026: The slow bets start paying. Reddit, creator content and their own posts lift them from Google pages 5 to 7 up to pages 1 to 2, and paid spend only goes behind creator videos that already convert.
• September 9, 2026: Just before Demo Day, Tsenta crosses $250K MRR, or $3M annualised. Nearly 17x in 12 weeks.
• Demo Day: Its YC profile reports more than 90,000 job seekers on the product.
• Today: Tsenta processes over 150,000 applications a day, and the employer side is next.

The lesson? Tsenta asks users to hand over something personal: their entire job search. Views couldn’t buy that. So the founders borrowed trust from creators their users already followed, many inside the same expat communities Agnay and Pulkit came from. Those users told them exactly what sucked, every fix made the next campaign convert better, and two students who’d sent 3,000 applications by hand hit a $3M run rate in 12 weeks. When your product asks for trust, don’t build it from scratch. Borrow it.