Y Combinator Startup Orange Slice Secures $5.3 Million in Seed Funding

Two University of Michigan grads who met on a Bollywood dance crew have emerged Y combiner with $5.3 million in seed funding.

Vihaar Nandigala and Kishan Sripada, both 23, co-founded the sales product Orange Slice, which uses AI to generate prospecting spreadsheets using prompts from salespeople and real-time data from the web.

They said the company was born from the idea that the biggest problem in sales was not messaging, but identifying who was worth talking to.

Orange Slice sells subscriptions to customers like sales engineers, along with others Y Combinator starts Novoflow and Pirros among its first users, they said.

1984 Ventures and Moxxie Ventures co-led the seed round, and Paul Graham participated as an angel investor. The funds will be used to recruit talented engineers, Nandigala said.

Nandigala and Sripada began building the startup and applied to Y Combinator as college seniors last year. At the time, YC advised them to finish their studies and reapply for the next cycle despite its reputation for welcoming dropouts. They were accepted into the next batch in summer 2025, even though they spent much of their final semester focused on the business.

“I don’t remember any of my classes during my last semester of college — I don’t think I was the best student,” Nandigala said. “Basically, we were still working full time on the business.”

Nandigala, who is CEO of Orange Slice, founded his latest startup, ghost kitchen company KitchenKonnect, at age 19, and was previously a summer analyst at JPMorgan. CTO Sripada founded choreography software company Formi and was a software engineering intern at Ramp.

Here’s a look at the pitch deck Orange Slice used to raise its $5.3 million seed round.