Ploid launches a people-data API for AI agents with 2 billion records

Ploid launched on Y Combinator Fall 2026. The company offers an API for AI agents and software to search, enrich and match people. Its data covers more than 2 billion people, Ploid says on its launch page. The YC launch page had 10 votes in its first day. The founders are Emmanuel Hernandez (CEO and CTO) and Kamran Karic (COO). Hernandez says he was an AI researcher at NYU before Ploid.

The product has four parts, Ploid says. Search is in plain English or with structured filters. Enrichment adds work history, emails, phone numbers and social profiles. Identity matching resolves a name, an email, a LinkedIn URL and an X handle to the same person. And queries can "pull fresh data live", Ploid says, instead of returning a cached record from months ago. Ploid offers a REST API, a command-line tool and a Model Context Protocol server. An agent can call it directly.

Why Ploid frames itself around agents

Most people-data vendors build for sales and go-to-market teams, Ploid says on its launch. The query shape is static: fill in a form, export a CSV, clean up what comes back. An agent calling a human-shaped product has to parse the CSV. It then guesses which Jane Smith is the one it asked about. Ploid's bet is that the product shape should change. The agent asks a question in words, the API returns one identity, and the agent acts.

Ploid's examples on its home page are concrete. Find senior machine-learning engineers who built ranking systems. Find Stripe alumni now building fintech companies. Compare candidates for a founding product role. These are not finished tools. They are prompts a sales lead or a recruiter would type.

Who it is for and what is missing

Ploid says its customers are sales platforms, recruiting platforms, customer intelligence products and AI agents. The product site offers Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Cursor, Replit, Lovable, Bolt.new and v0 by Vercel as agent integrations. There is a public pricing page. No customer logo is published on the YC launch or the home page. There is no latency figure and no accuracy test. There is no benchmark against ZoomInfo, Apollo, Clearbit or Lusha, which claim the same kind of coverage.

The YC deal on the page is 50 percent off a yearly plan. The team is based in New York and Sarajevo. Karic represented Bosnia and Herzegovina at the STEM Olympiad in Germany. He won two gold medals, in maths and science, against more than 5,000 competitors, the launch says.

Why a reader should test it before buying

A people-data provider is only as good as its last refresh. "Live" is a claim every vendor in this market makes. The one that holds up is the vendor whose records are current when a user checks them. The honest way to buy this is a side-by-side test. Pick 100 identities a reader cares about. Run them against the current provider and against Ploid. Count the hits that are correct and current. The launch asks readers to try it free and tell the team what breaks. Take that offer.

The reader's agent is already looking up people somewhere. The question is where the next lookup lands. A product shaped for an agent, or one shaped for a form. Ploid is a bet that the first option is a different product.

Source

• Primary source: Ploid on Y Combinator.
• Product site: Ploid.