Dean Stratakos is Co-Founder and CTO of Stage, an AI-native code review platform built for fast-moving engineering teams, and a member of Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch.

Dean holds both a B.S. in Computer Science (Systems) and an M.S. in Computer Science (AI) from Stanford University, where he was a Division I varsity tennis player.

His firsthand experience with fragmented code review processes at both a large firm and a small startup directly inspired the creation of Stage, recognizing that the bottleneck in modern software development has shifted from writing code to reviewing it.

Prior to Stage, Dean was a software engineer at Five Rings, a quantitative trading firm in NYC, where he led the company-wide AI initiative and built an in-house coding agent; he also interned at Apple and Citadel, and was an early engineer at Yuzu Health.

Stage, backed by Y Combinator (W26), uses AI to organize pull requests into logical chapters so reviewers can understand changes faster, directly addressing the growing challenge of AI-accelerated codebases outpacing human review capacity.