Two teenagers, one of them a former student of Delhi Public School Ruby Park, have been selected for the Y Combinator’s incubator programme, a start-up accelerator that counts Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, as its supporter.
OpenAI, the research company, is behind products like ChatGPT.
Aayam Bansal, 18, the DPS alumnus, set up a company with Ishaan Gangwani, 18, from Pune.
Aayam and Ishaan started working on setting up their company, InkVell, in June 2025 and registered it in San Francisco in September.
InkVell’s website describes itself as a platform that helps transform research into publication-ready documents with AI-powered formatting, citations, and professional templates. “We work on both business-to-business and business-to-consumer models,” said Ishaan.
The company’s co-founders will join the YC programme from January.
The website of Y Combinator says its goal is “to help startups really take off”.
The website adds: “They arrive at YC at all different stages. Some haven’t even started working yet, and others have been launched for a year or more”.
Altman was president of Y Combinator from 2016 to 2019.
Aayam said Y Combinator runs the three-month programme four times a year. “Each batch has between 50 and 200 start-up people.”
Founded in 2005, the start-up accelerator has so far funded over 5,000 companies. Among them are Zepto, Groww and Razorpay.
Ishaan felt their selection for the programme was rooted in their company’s philosophy and their unique profiles.
Aayam passed out of DPS Ruby Park, and Ishaan from Indus International School Pune earlier this year.
InkVell has raised $1.4 million from “venture capital firms like Cory Levy (Z-Fellows) and FireStreak Ventures”, said Aayam.