Why look beyond Cascade?

Cascade builds custom evaluation infrastructure that makes AI agents reliable by learning from their real production behavior. Part of YC W2026, it was founded by Adam AlSayyad (CEO) and Haluk Cem Demirhan (CTO), both researchers from the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab — the same lab behind Databricks and Perplexity.

Common reasons users explore alternatives

Only 2 people with no disclosed funding beyond YC
No public pricing or self-serve demo available
Competes with evaluation platforms like Braintrust and Arize
Positioning around model distillation may confuse buyers expecting traditional knowledge distillation

See full Cascade profile