Nemil Dalal

Dalal has written that he grew up in a family of technologists in New Jersey: his father was a statistician at Bell Labs and later Bellcore, and his mother worked in telecommunications programming at AT&TAT&TAT&T (AT&T Inc.) is a telecommunications company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Its predecessor was SBC Communications, a regional holding company created in the 1984 breakup of the Bell System; SBC merged with the original AT&T Corp. in 2005 and adopted its name, and it has since operated a nationwide wireless network and fiber broadband, at one time also owning DIRECTV and WarnerMedia.Open the full entry. He went on to work in startup product management and engineering in Silicon Valley.⁠[1]

His X profile lists Y Combinator’s Summer 2012 batch (YC S12) and Stanford, and describes him as “Crypto class of 2014.”⁠[2]

His personal website describes him as a Visiting Partner at Y Combinator. It says that earlier, at Coinbase, he helped lead USDC to $1 billion, led the company’s asset strategy, launched staking, led developer products and helped launch x402.⁠[3]

Coinbase launched x402 in a post co-authored by Dalal, Erik Reppel and Dan Kim. The open standard uses the HTTP “402 Payment Required” status code to let apps, APIs and AI agents pay directly in stablecoins; launch collaborators included AWS, AnthropicAnthropicAnthropic is an artificial intelligence research and product company founded in 2021 that develops the Claude models, assistant, and tools such as Claude Code, and operates as a public benefit corporation. Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei are its co-founders, and its research covers model safety, interpretability, and steerability.Open the full entry, Circle and NEAR.⁠[4]

In an essay on his website he wrote that Y Combinator’s motto, “make something people want,” had become “make something agents want” for a growing group of funded companies. He cited YC startups such as InsForge and AgentPhone and pointed to opportunities in rebuilding human tools for agents and in “humans as a service.”⁠[5]

Dalal wrote on X that Y Combinator was keen to fund more crypto startups solving financial needs, including AI capital raising, stablecoins, trading and agents, and shared its latest crypto request for startups, noting that the next application deadline was that Monday.⁠[6]

The document said the past year was the first in which crypto uptake was led by institutions rather than consumers, and expected assets from stocks and debt to commodities and home titles to be tokenized. Its focus areas for the next six months included AI capital raising, new dollar and non-dollar stablecoins, stablecoin neobanks, tokenization, exchanges and trading interfaces, agent trading and agent infrastructure.⁠[7]