Graphide launched a GitHub Actions runner that finishes jobs under a minute

Graphide launched on Y Combinator on Tuesday. It is a replacement for GitHub Actions. A team changes one line in its workflow file and the job runs on Graphide's own machines. The company's launch page says 16 of 24 CI jobs it ran finished in under a minute. On 19 of 24, Graphide was at least ten times faster than GitHub's own runner. The results were the same.

What the benchmark says

The 24 jobs come from open-source projects, including seven from other Fall 2026 YC companies. Each job ran its full test suite with no tests skipped. Graphide's own number is the median of five runs. The GitHub number is the median of the project's recent runs on its own CI.

Graphide gave one named example. The Trivy project's build dropped from 25 minutes to under 30 seconds. Some projects saw up to 50 times the speed. The numbers are Graphide's own, measured on its own machines and reported in its launch post.

How the runner works

Graphide lists the parts that make the difference. Each job starts on a warm machine with the dependencies and build cache already loaded. The runner splits the test run across lanes. It resizes the number of lanes as the test uses more or less CPU. The team patched the Linux kernel, the test libraries, and the compilers to cut overhead in each step. Each job runs in its own small virtual machine that is destroyed when the job ends.

There is a second feature called test pruning. It skips tests that touch no code in the current change. Graphide says that cuts cost by another 50 to 70 percent on top of the speed gain. The claim is the company's own, and the test-pruning safety depends on the project's test map.

Price and who is behind it

Pricing is $0.003 per vCPU-minute on the pay-as-you-go plan. The company says a fixed unlimited plan is available on request. Both plans include an AI pull-request review bot. The YC page carries 5 votes at the time of launch, so there is no public traction number yet.

The founders are Dan McGee, chief executive, and Ben McIntyre, chief technology officer. McGee's past job was at Illumio. McIntyre is a student at the University of Cincinnati. The company is in YC's Fall 2026 batch.

For a team building software, the only test is the team's own suite. The Trivy number is Graphide's own, on Graphide's hardware. A buyer should take one real build pipeline, point it at Graphide for a day, and compare the medians. If the shape holds, the saving is review time as well as machine time.

Source

• Y Combinator launch page
• Graphide