Home / Founders / Kushal Byatnal
Byatnal is rebuilding document processing around language and vision models, aimed at the files that break legacy OCR.
Kushal Byatnal is co-founder and chief executive of Extend, a New York document processing company whose APIs parse, extract, split, and classify complex documents for technical teams.
An Early Engineer at Brex
Byatnal joined Brex around its fifteenth employee and worked there from 2018 to 2020, moving from engineer to technical lead across card and cash products, according to his personal site. His Y Combinator profile describes him as a two-time technical founder.
Co-founding Stir in 2020
From 2020 to 2022 he was co-founder and chief technology officer of Stir, a creator fintech company that scaled to hundreds of millions in payment volume. He then left to start again from zero, founding Extend with Eli Badgio in 2022 and going through Y Combinator in Winter 2023.
Selling Accuracy on the Hardest Documents
Extend competes in a crowded market of OCR vendors and foundation model APIs, so Byatnal has focused on accuracy on messy, real-world files. Customers the company lists include Brex, Square, Checkr, and Flatiron Health, and Extend has raised $17 million in funding led by Innovation Endeavors.
Personal Life
Byatnal is based in New York. He describes a recurring pattern in his career: joining companies before they are obvious and staying for the work of making software reliable at scale.
