Tim Cherkasov

Tim Cherkasov's web3 startup Clustr once looked healthy, then he shut it down and flew to San Francisco, California, with no plan, looking for inspiration, he wrote on Product Hunt. On a 20-minute walk in the Dogpatch neighborhood, a YC partner told him, "Moving cautiously kills startups." He is now co-founder and CEO of Trace, a London, England, company that orchestrates work between AI agents and people.

Product Work at Copper

Cherkasov was a product manager at Copper, a digital asset custodian, where he delivered an institutional offering for State Street, according to Trace's YC page. Earlier he worked as a data scientist across hedge funds and scaleups, and he has built startups since he was 17 in retail tech, travel and web3. Co-founder Artur Romanov, whom he met at university, was a senior engineer at Deliveroo.

Six Applications to Y Combinator

After the trip, Cherkasov spent two weeks conducting 54 interviews with experts, clients and startups, and the team closed a pilot with three companies. Trace was accepted into YC's summer 2025 batch on its sixth application, he wrote.

Managing AI Agents at Trace

According to TechCrunch, Trace raised $3 million in seed funding in February 2026 from Y Combinator, Zeno Ventures, Goodwater Capital and others. "We're building the manager that knows where to put them," Cherkasov said, referring to the AI labs' tools. Trace builds a knowledge graph from tools such as email, Slack and Airtable.

Context Engineering at Trace

"Now we've moved from prompt engineering to context engineering," CTO Artur Romanov told TechCrunch. "Whoever provides the best context at the right time is going to be the infrastructure on top of which the AI-first companies will be built," he said.