Two University of Michigan graduates who met on a Bollywood dance team have successfully launched their startup, Orange Slice, and secured $5.3 million in seed funding after completing Y Combinator’s accelerator program. Vihaar Nandigala and Kishan Sripada, both 23, co-founded the company with a mission to solve a core challenge in sales: identifying the right prospects to reach out to, rather than focusing solely on crafting the perfect message. Orange Slice is an AI-powered sales tool that generates prospecting spreadsheets based on sales teams’ natural language prompts and pulls real-time data from across the web. The platform helps sales professionals quickly identify high-potential leads by automating the time-consuming process of research and data compilation. The company has already attracted early customers, including sales engineers and other tech startups. Notably, fellow Y Combinator alumni Novoflow and Pirros are among its first users. The seed round was co-led by 1984 Ventures and Moxxie Ventures, with participation from Paul Graham, a founding partner of Y Combinator, as an angel investor. The funds will primarily support hiring top engineering talent to scale the product and infrastructure. Nandigala and Sripada began building Orange Slice while still in college, applying to Y Combinator as seniors. Despite YC’s well-known preference for founders who drop out, the program advised them to finish their degrees and reapply. They were accepted into the summer 2025 batch, even as they dedicated most of their final semester to developing the startup. “I don’t remember any of my classes my last semester of college — I don’t think I was the best student,” Nandigala said. “Fundamentally, we were still working on the business full time.” Nandigala, who serves as CEO, previously founded KitchenKonnect, a ghost kitchen venture, at age 19 and worked as a summer analyst at JPMorgan. Sripada, the company’s CTO, founded choreography software Formi and completed a software engineering internship at Ramp. The duo’s journey reflects a growing trend of student founders who balance academics with entrepreneurship, leveraging accelerator programs like Y Combinator to gain validation, mentorship, and funding at an early stage.