Jerry Zhang

Jerry Zhang grew up in Canada, earned a perfect GPA, competed in national math contests and once ranked fourth in the country in the 200-meter breaststroke, according to Entrepreneurial Magazine. He is now co-founder of Lemma, which monitors AI agents in production.

Meeting Cole Gawin as Freshmen at Southern California

Zhang and co-founder Cole Gawin met as freshmen in SEP, the student startup program at the University of Southern California. Their first project together was Clinicode, an AI healthcare company doing medical coding, Zhang said on a podcast. Zhang then worked as a software engineer at Chipstack, building AI agents for chip design, while Gawin built agents at the healthcare startup Tandem.

Hitting the Same Wall at Two Internships

Gawin found himself rewriting prompts by hand, then built a program to automate the cycle. According to Entrepreneurial Magazine, when he emailed Zhang about it, engineers at Zhang's internship were doing the same manual work. An investor who had passed on Clinicode sent them $30,000, and both took a semester off to build.

Zhang talked Gawin into applying to Y Combinator. In a ten-minute interview, a partner asked how their work differed from DSPy, and the acceptance call came the next day. Lemma helps teams uncover hidden failures in AI agents, diagnose root causes across thousands of traces and deploy automated fixes.