From Zapier for Devs to Powering 90% AI Agents

Trigger.dev lets developers add AI agents to their products with a simple SDK — handling execution, long-running workflows, and reliability so they don't have to. The company just announced their Series A from Standard Capital, and over 90% of their usage now comes from agent workflows. In this episode of Founder Firesides, co-founders Matt and Eric sat down with YC's Nicolas Dessaigne to talk about three versions of the product before finding product market fit, how building async infrastructure for two years accidentally put them in the perfect position for the agent era, and why they think the future of computing is programmatic checkpoint and restore — freezing and resuming compute on demand. http://trigger.dev/ Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs 00:00 What Trigger.dev does 00:55 Zapier for developers (v1) 04:14 The first pivot 06:36 Finding product-market fit 10:43 Real customer use cases 18:00 Open source as agent marketing 23:14 Hiring after Opus 4.5 27:41 Shipping quality code with agents 31:17 Advice for new founders

Nicolas DessaignehostMattguestEricguest

May 9, 202633mWatch on YouTube ↗

EPISODE INFO

Released: May 9, 2026
Duration: 33m
Channel: YC Root Access
Watch on YouTube: ▶ Open ↗

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Trigger.dev lets developers add AI agents to their products with a simple SDK — handling execution, long-running workflows, and reliability so they don't have to. The company just announced their Series A from Standard Capital, and over 90% of their usage now comes from agent workflows. In this episode of Founder Firesides, co-founders Matt and Eric sat down with YC's Nicolas Dessaigne to talk about three versions of the product before finding product market fit, how building async infrastructure for two years accidentally put them in the perfect position for the agent era, and why they think the future of computing is programmatic checkpoint and restore — freezing and resuming compute on demand. http://trigger.dev/ Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs 00:00 What Trigger.dev does 00:55 Zapier for developers (v1) 04:14 The first pivot 06:36 Finding product-market fit 10:43 Real customer use cases 18:00 Open source as agent marketing 23:14 Hiring after Opus 4.5 27:41 Shipping quality code with agents 31:17 Advice for new founders

SPEAKERS

Nicolas Dessaigne
host
Partner at Y Combinator and host on YC Root Access.
Matt
guest
Co-founder of Trigger.dev (developer workflow/orchestration platform).
Eric
guest
Co-founder of Trigger.dev (developer workflow/orchestration platform).

EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of YC Root Access, featuring Nicolas Dessaigne and Matt, From Zapier for Devs to Powering 90% AI Agents explores trigger.dev pivoted into infrastructure powering reliable long-running AI agents Trigger.dev evolved through three versions—from a developer-friendly “Zapier” concept to a fully managed platform that executes long-running background jobs—after realizing developers wanted reliable hosted execution, not DIY infrastructure.

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