Elena Zhao is Co-Founder of Litmus (YC S26), an AI-powered technical hiring platform that replaces abstract coding challenges with real-world async engineering assessments.

Elena studied Applied Math and CS at Columbia Engineering (SEAS '26) and gained hands-on software engineering experience at Meta and Two Sigma, where she saw firsthand how traditional interviews fail to predict real on-the-job performance.

Elena's core insight is that what it means to be a developer has fundamentally changed with AI, yet hiring processes have not kept up, creating a costly gap between interview performance and actual job delivery.

Elena co-founded Litmus alongside Shaivi Rau, and the pair earned a coveted spot in Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch after a competitive application process that concluded in December 2025.

Litmus now serves engineering teams looking to scale, offering a full interview pipeline generated from real repos, tickets, and job descriptions, with integrations into tools like Ashby, Greenhouse, and Lever.