Adhityaa Chandrasekar

Adhityaa Chandrasekar
Occupation	CEO and co-founder of Subtrace
Known for	Founding Subtrace, a zero-code network tracing tool
Education	University of Waterloo; IIT Madras

Adhityaa Chandrasekar is a software engineer and entrepreneur based in San Francisco, California. He is the co-founder and CEO of Subtrace, a zero-code network tracing tool for backend infrastructure. Subtrace was part of Y Combinator's Winter 2025 (W25) batch.

Career

Before founding Subtrace, Chandrasekar worked as a software engineer at Google, where he focused on Kubernetes internals and infrastructure monitoring for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). He also performed site reliability engineering (SRE) work at LinkedIn. In total, he has approximately ten years of experience in software engineering, with a focus on developer-facing infrastructure and observability.

Chandrasekar holds degrees from the University of Waterloo and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras).

He co-founded Subtrace alongside Sachin Sridhar, who serves as co-founder and CTO. Sridhar previously worked as a software engineer at Microsoft on Power BI and Microsoft Fabric, and also studied computer science at IIT Madras.

Subtrace is described as a "zero-code network tracer" that provides developers with visibility into every HTTP request occurring within their production infrastructure without requiring any code changes. The tool is designed to function similarly to a browser's inspect element feature but applied to backend systems, showing incoming and outgoing HTTP requests in real time. It consolidates request details such as payloads, latency, status codes, headers, and logs into a single interface. Under the hood, Subtrace uses BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter) technology, which allows it to operate without root privileges or modifications to application code. The product is largely written in Go and targets teams working with distributed systems, operating system internals, security, and networking.

As of early 2025, Subtrace's open-source repository on GitHub had accumulated approximately 2,500 stars. The company operates as a business-to-business (B2B) product primarily serving engineering and product teams. In March 2025, Subtrace raised a $500,000 seed round with participation from Y Combinator and investor Kevin Lin.

Chandrasekar has also maintained a personal blog where he has written about topics in software engineering, including Go worker pools, SQL practices, and software pricing strategy.