Tim Cherkasov

Tim Cherkasov is co-founder and CEO of Trace, a workflow orchestration platform that builds organizational context so AI agents and humans can share the same processes. With cofounder Artur Romanov he is based in London, came through YC Summer 2025, and in February 2026 announced a $3 million seed from Y Combinator, Zeno Ventures, Goodwater Capital, and others.

Fintech product path into Trace

Cherkasov and Romanov have worked together on projects since university. Cherkasov previously worked as a product manager at Copper, a digital asset custodian, where he helped deliver an institutional offering for State Street, and earlier worked as a data scientist across hedge funds and scaleups. He has been founding startups since he was 17 across retail tech, travel, and web3. Romanov previously built ML pipelines for grocery catalog data at Deliveroo.

The manager for AI interns

In a TechCrunch interview about the seed, Cherkasov cast Trace as the missing management layer around capable but under-contextualized agents. "OpenAI and Anthropic are building these brilliant interns that can be leveraged within the company," he said. "We're building the manager that knows where to put them." Trace connects tools such as Slack, email, and Airtable, builds a knowledge graph of people and work, then turns plain-English process descriptions into workflows that mix automated agent steps with human approvals.

Context engineering as the bet

CTO Artur Romanov told TechCrunch that the industry has moved from prompt engineering to context engineering, and that whoever supplies the right context at the right time becomes infrastructure for AI-first companies. Trace's own launch notes say customers already run hundreds of live workflows for back-office work such as onboarding, document processing, and sales operations, with a minority of tasks currently assigned to agents and the rest staying with people who keep oversight.