Tim Cherkasov is Co-Founder and CEO of Trace (YC S25), a context-aware AI workflow orchestration platform helping enterprises intelligently deploy AI agents alongside human workers.

Tim holds an MSc in Business Analytics from UCL and has been building startups since age 17 across retail tech, travel, and web3.

Tim has a deep fintech background spanning hedge funds and scaleups as a data scientist, and previously served as a product manager at Copper, a digital asset custodian, where he delivered an institutional offering for State Street.

At Trace, Tim has led the company through Y Combinator's Summer 2025 cohort and closed a $3M seed round backed by YC, Goodwater Capital, Zeno Ventures, and others.

Trace is pioneering the shift from prompt engineering to context engineering, positioning itself as the orchestration infrastructure layer on which AI-first enterprises will be built.