Yousef Helal is Co-Founder and CTO at Vendo (YC S26), a Y Combinator-backed open-source customization layer that lets product users build their own features and micro-apps directly on top of existing software.

Yousef graduated high school at 15, earned a BS in EECS from UC Berkeley and an MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford, before designing FPGA infrastructure at Apple and working on chip design at AMD.

A published researcher whose teaching methods as a TA at Berkeley won academic awards, Yousef brings a rare combination of deep hardware engineering and AI product thinking to the developer tools space.

Prior to Vendo, Yousef co-founded Aisle, a startup building in-store AI shopping assistants for retailers, and was backed by Founders, Inc., a prominent early-stage venture studio.

Vendo, launched in 2026 and accepted into Y Combinator Summer 2026, is redefining the agentic software era by enabling end-user product personalization at scale without touching a single line of source code.