Robert Kim and Dinmukhamed Mailibay grew up together in Kazakhstan, studied at KAIST and worked side by side in London, England, before founding Laminar, according to Tech.eu. Kim is co-founder and CEO of the company, which builds open-source observability for AI agents. Laminar was founded in 2024 and went through Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch.
Scaling Data Pipelines at Bloomberg
As an intern at Palantir, Kim built a semantic search package that now powers many internal AI teams, and he worked on a resource allocation engine for the core infrastructure team, he wrote on Laminar's YC page. At Bloomberg he scaled a market tick processing pipeline by 10x, to 10M ticks per second.
Mailibay, Laminar's CTO, built payment infrastructure at AWS.
Observability for Long Agent Runs
"When your agent fails 40 minutes into a task, today's tools show you a wall of thousands of spans and say 'good luck.' We built Laminar so you can pinpoint the exact decision that went wrong and rerun from that point," Kim said in an announcement from Atlantic.
Laminar announced a $3 million seed round in March 2026, led by Atlantic.vc with participation from Y Combinator, AAL.vc and angels including Ben Sigelman, co-creator of OpenTelemetry, and Ant Wilson, CTO of Supabase.
Resuming Broken Agent Runs
According to Tech.eu, Laminar's Agent Debugger lets developers rerun an agent from any step with its prior context preserved. For browser agents, it records browser sessions and syncs them with traces. Its Signals feature uses AI to surface failure patterns across runs.
Laminar is written in Rust and fully open source, according to its YC page, which lists Browser Use, OpenHands, Rye.com and Alai among the companies using it in production.
