Minicor's $3.8M seed turns legacy Windows desktops into callable APIs

Minicor, a San Francisco company that gives AI developers a programmatic route into applications still operated through a screen, has raised $3.8M in seed funding led by Brad Gillespie at IA Ventures, with Y Combinator and Paul Graham participating.

The round was announced on October 14, 2026. Minicor's announcement also names Pioneer Fund, Robinhood Ventures, Garage Capital, Rebel Fund, Blast, SuccessVP, K5 Global, 20VC, Phosphor Capital and Metsu Capital among the other participants, and identifies Austen Allred, Henri Stern, Matteo Franceschetti and Jeff Henriod. Individual allocations and valuation were left undisclosed.

What the company sells is a connection rather than a replacement. In Minicor's documentation, the unit of automation is a job with an endpoint: developers teach the job through sample API inputs, and the builder refines the automation against those examples. A Windows desktop service then performs the application steps, so a product can request a workflow through a familiar programmatic interface even though the older application's screens, fields and sessions remain part of execution. Co-founder and CEO Faizaan Chishtie and co-founder and CTO Saheed Akinbile are building that infrastructure for AI vendors that need to reach software their customers already run.

Because the legacy application stays in the customer's operation, observability sits close to the core of the product. Minicor describes recorded runs, step logs, human review and status events among its tools. These are vendor-described capabilities; the documentation is not an independently measured reliability benchmark, and their practical value depends on how a particular customer's workflows behave.

Its use-case catalog spans entering clinical information, updating business records and handling automotive workflows. Those examples show the kinds of connections on offer and are best read as a product catalog rather than a list of publicly identified customers or proof that any given application can be automated without additional work.

The pitch lands at a specific point in an AI vendor's commercial relationship. A seller targeting healthcare, financial services, automotive or logistics can meet a buyer whose required data and writes live in a desktop system. Integration then becomes part of what the vendor must demonstrate, deliver and support — work Minicor is trying to absorb by taking on the continuing operation of the desktop workflow.

The company's origin story points the same direction. The founders had been working on observability and recovery for API integrations when a prospective customer with an on-prem electronic medical record system pulled them toward desktop automation. A buyer's existing installation became an instruction about where the product needed to go.