Poka Labs

The modern operating system for chemical manufacturing.

pokalabs.com

HQ: San Francisco, CA, USA

1-10

B2B

Company research

Public company, workplace, funding, and market signals

Updated Jul 30, 2026

Overview

Poka Labs is a San Francisco-based, YC S24 industrial AI company building agentic commercial-operations software for chemical manufacturers and adjacent industrials. Its current product automates pricing, quoting, and guided selling on top of messy ERP/CRM/email/PDF data, while older YC materials described an earlier scheduling/production-planning focus. Public funding data is not perfectly consistent across sources, but the clearest recent records point to a September 2024 seed round around $3M. No public company GitHub or X account was located.

Primary product

AI agents for pricing, quoting, and guided selling for industrial manufacturers

Founded

2023

Headquarters

San Francisco, United States

Team size

1-10

Industry

Technology, Information and Internet

Sub-industry

Industrial AI / workflow automation software

Offices

2261 Market Street, Suite 10771, San Francisco, CA 94114, United States

Business model

enterprise SaaS

B2B software

sales-led direct enterprise sales

human-in-the-loop automation

Funding

Stage

Seed (public sources also describe the financing as pre-seed)

Total raised

$3M

Latest round

Seed · Sep 2024

Latest amount

$3M

Seed

Sep 2024 · Y Combinator

$3M

People & investors

Leadership

Malay Shah

Founder and CEO

Andrew Bass

Co-Founder & CTO

Investors

Work & culture

Founder-led, domain-expert, security-first, and fast-moving. Public materials emphasize human-in-the-loop workflows, enterprise security, and a bias toward shipping quickly into messy real-world industrial environments.

Compensation

Public YC job listings show Fullstack / AI Engineer compensation of $150K-$200K base plus 0.50%-1.25% equity, and Founding Deployment Strategist compensation of $140K-$190K base plus 0.50%-0.75% equity.

Product & market

Pricing

Custom enterprise pricing; demo-led sales

Differentiators

—Built for messy industrial data (emails, PDFs, spreadsheets, ERPs)
—No rip-and-replace implementation
—Agentic pricing, quoting, and guided selling
—Captures tribal knowledge and business rules
—Human-in-the-loop approvals
—Security-first architecture with SOC 2 Type II controls

Technology

Oracle

TypeScript

React

Salesforce

Salesforce CPQ

NetSuite

IFS

OpenAI

Python

Figma

AWS

GCP

Excel

ERP/CRM integrations

Customers

chemical manufacturers

chemical distributors

industrial manufacturers

specialty chemicals companies

mid-market manufacturers

F100 enterprises

Competitors

Vendavo

PROS

Salesforce CPQ

Pricefx

Conga CPQ

Scale & contact

Estimated monthly visits

2.3K

sales@pokalabs.com

Latest news

Poka Labs Launches: Modern Operating System for Chemical Manufacturing

Fondo · Feb 2026

Third-party launch roundup reiterating the company’s chemical-manufacturing automation pitch and founder backgrounds.

CAS Number Chaos: Why Chemical Lookups Are Harder Than They Look

Poka Labs · Nov 2025

Official blog post describing messy chemical lookup pain points, supporting the company’s claims about unstructured industrial data and SKU resolution.

The Case for AI-Native Pricing in Chemicals

Poka Labs · Dec 2024

Official blog post arguing that chemicals pricing should move beyond rules-based systems toward AI-native pricing that learns continuously from quotes and market signals.

Poka Labs launches AI software for chemical manufacturing

Y Combinator / LinkedIn · Aug 2024

Launch announcement highlighting the product's use of emails, PDFs, spreadsheets, ERPs, and other data to automate production planning and scheduling.