
Founded by Saner Cakir, Yash Pansari & Kayla Lee
Ex Stanford/Berkeley researchers, specialized in building reliable AI solutions for high-stakes applications. Saner (CEO) built an AI copilot that helped UCSF cardiothoracic surgeons save real lives. Yash (CTO) was a quant researcher at Optiver and Goldman Sachs, where he enabled millions in annual profitability with his high frequency trading strategies. Kayla (COO @ Trace) did her bachelor’s and master’s in CS at UC Berkeley, where she led groundbreaking NLP research under Professor Dan Klein. Kayla was also a national-level athlete in fencing and lacrosse — her unwavering perseverance and laser focus have become core values of Trace.
Customer service is one of the largest operational spends across banks (15% opex), insurance (40% opex), and fintechs. However, call centers offer inconsistent service quality despite the cost.
Existing AI solutions only read off of public documents and deflect the user — they can’t access account-specific data or take actions like human agents would. In financial services, this causes extreme user frustration.
Trace AI agents securely integrate with core systems to offer instant, 24/7 resolution over the phone. So far, they achieve 95% end-to-end resolution of calls across quoting, card applications, transaction tracking, and more — all while following policy and never leaking sensitive data. With under 0.2s time to first token, they are also optimized for seamless interactions over voice.