When Alisa Rae applied to Y Combinator last year as a solo founder, she was rejected. The advice was to find a cofounder. So she flew to San Francisco from Sydney and searched hard.
But she decided solo founding was still the right path.
She raised a $2 million pre-seed in 36 hours, onboarded a founding engineer and applied again. This time, YC said yes. Rae is now in the W26 batch building Lucent, which automates bug detection for AI-powered software.
“ChatGPT is like my CTO,” Rae — then named Alisa Wu — told Capital Brief last year. That’s evolved with the addition of the founding engineer, but AI coding tools, particularly Anthropic's Claude Code, remain embedded across Lucent’s engineering pipeline.
"There's no limit on how much each engineer spends on Claude Code," she says. "It's how we ship quickly with a lean team while maintaining quality.”
