2026-02-06T10:00:02.401Z
Two Michigan grads raised $5.3 million out of the Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator.
Orange Slice generates sales spreadsheets using prompts from salespeople and sales engineers.
Here’s the pitch deck cofounders Vihaar Nandigala and Kishan Sripada used to raise their seed round.
Two University of Michigan graduates who met on a Bollywood dance team have emerged from Y Combinator with $5.3 million in seed funding.
Vihaar Nandigala and Kishan Sripada, both 23, cofounded sales product Orange Slice, which uses AI to generate prospecting spreadsheets using salespeople’s prompts and real-time data from across the web.
They said the company was born of the idea that the larger problem in sales isn’t messaging, but identifying who’s worth reaching out to.
Orange Slice sells subscriptions to customers like sales engineers, with fellow Y Combinator startups Novoflow and Pirros among its early users, they said.
1984 Ventures and Moxxie Ventures co-led the seed round, and Paul Graham participated as an angel investor. Funds will go toward hiring engineering talent, Nandigala said.
Nandigala and Sripada began building the startup and applied to Y Combinator as college seniors last year. At the time, YC advised them to finish school and reapply the following cycle despite its reputation for welcoming dropouts. They got accepted into the following batch in summer 2025, even as they spent much of their final semester focused on the business.
“I don’t remember any of my classes my last semester of college — I don’t think I was the best student,” Nandigala said. “Fundamentally, we were still working on the business full time.”
Nandigala, who serves as the CEO of Orange Slice, founded his last startup, ghost kitchen company KitchenKonnect, at 19, and previously served as a summer analyst at JPMorgan. CTO Sripada founded the choreography software company Formi and was a software engineering intern at Ramp.
Here’s a look at the pitch deck Orange Slice used to raise its $5.3 million seed round.
