Ray Liao is Co-Founder and CEO of Inkbox (YC S26), building the identity and communication layer for AI agents, giving them their own email, phone number, iMessage, and internet address.

Ray completed his Computer Science PhD at MIT, where he studied machine learning, before co-founding Inkbox alongside Alex Wilcox and Dima Vremenko.

Ray identified a critical gap in the agentic AI stack: as autonomous agents proliferate, they lack persistent, real-world identities to communicate across channels without human intermediaries.

Inkbox was accepted into Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch and is backed by NFX and Night Capital, with YC partners Tyler Bosmeny and Boris Jabes supporting the team.

Inkbox enables developers and companies to provision agents with unique phone numbers, email inboxes, and internet addresses, powering integrations with leading agent frameworks like Claude Code, Nous Research Hermes, and OpenClaw.