Neel Sharma

Neel Sharma is cofounder and CEO of Sentrial, a San Francisco company building production monitoring for AI agents. Sentrial detects semantic failures such as infinite loops, hallucinations, tool misuse, and user frustration in real time, then helps engineers diagnose root causes and ship fixes. Sharma and cofounder Anay Shukla joined the YC Winter 2026 batch as a two-person team.

Berkeley undergrads who watched agents fail green

Sharma studied computer science at UC Berkeley and worked on agentic optimization at Sense. Shukla, also Berkeley CS, deployed DevOps agents at Accenture. On Launch HN they said debugging agents was often harder than building them, and that traditional monitoring catches errors and latency while missing the behavioral failures that make agents untrustworthy in production.

Datadog framing for agent reliability

Sentrial's pitch is monitoring at the semantic layer: session replay, failure clustering, and recommended fixes when an agent goes off the rails. Coverage of their Demo Day run noted the company went from zero MRR to about $30,000 MRR in the weeks before presenting, still with only YC's seed check outside the two founders. Integration is described as a small callback handler for stacks like LangChain, with Slack alerts when quality drops.