Understudy Labs

Understudy trains company-specific AI models that are 100x smaller than frontier from the work employees and agents already do.

[Luis Manrique @lluismanrique]

Excited to announce that @aamirpoonawalla and I are launching @understudylabs as part of @ycombinator 's S26 batch.

We help you cut your company’s Anthropic bill by 80% with no loss of performance.

Understudy is an inference cloud. We capture your AI traces, train smaller models, and automatically deploy them (only when they outperform the expensive model you are currently paying for).

Instead of renting the same frontier model forever, your AI infrastructure gets cheaper and better every time it runs.