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Lapis

Fall 2025Active

AI that creates and runs ads, end-end

Save
Lapis logo

Lapis

Fall 2025Active

AI that creates and runs ads, end-end

Save
Company details

Lapis builds, launches, and scales paid ad campaigns for DTC and SaaS businesses.

Lapis agents handle every step of the paid ads journey: writing ad copy (headlines and descriptions), generating the static images used in ads, deploying campaigns across paid channels, creating a custom landing page for each ad, and feeding real user interaction data back into a self-improving ads engine that gets better every day.

With Lapis, businesses can rapidly iterate on ads and A/B test at scale, free from the human design and creative bottlenecks that slow teams down. Using Lapis, companies can quantitatively improve their paid ads performance by up to 20x.

Lapis is used by 1,500+ marketing teams and 30+ enterprises, from Fortune 500 businesses to fast growing DTC businesses, and supports 10 languages including English, Spanish, and Italian.

Location
San Francisco, CA, USA
Founded
2025
Category
Artificial Intelligence
YC Directory Pagewww.trylapis.com
Founders
  • VG
    Varunram Ganesh
    Founder
    X / TwitterLinkedIn
  • SS
    Sai Surbehera
    Co Founder
    X / TwitterLinkedIn

Lapis builds, launches, and scales paid ad campaigns for DTC and SaaS businesses.

Lapis agents handle every step of the paid ads journey: writing ad copy (headlines and descriptions), generating the static images used in ads, deploying campaigns across paid channels, creating a custom landing page for each ad, and feeding real user interaction data back into a self-improving ads engine that gets better every day.

With Lapis, businesses can rapidly iterate on ads and A/B test at scale, free from the human design and creative bottlenecks that slow teams down. Using Lapis, companies can quantitatively improve their paid ads performance by up to 20x.

Lapis is used by 1,500+ marketing teams and 30+ enterprises, from Fortune 500 businesses to fast growing DTC businesses, and supports 10 languages including English, Spanish, and Italian.

Location
San Francisco, CA, USA
Founded
2025
Category
Artificial Intelligence
YC Directory Pagewww.trylapis.com
Founders
  • VG
    Varunram Ganesh
    Founder
    X / TwitterLinkedIn
  • SS
    Sai Surbehera
    Co Founder
    X / TwitterLinkedIn

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On this page
  • Overview
  • Founding Story
  • Timeline
  • What They Built
  • Market Position
  • Target Customers
  • Market Size
  • Competition
  • Business Model
  • Traction
  • Post-Mortem
  • Key Lessons
  • Sources

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Exec Briefing

Actionable insights

If you only have a few minutes to spare, here’s what investors, operators, and founders should know about Lapis (F25).

  1. A transition needs a bridge. Two first-party product stories are visible, but the reason for the change is not. Explain what was learned before asking buyers to follow.
  2. Services expose the hard parts. A strategist can reveal where automation fails, but labor and software economics must be measured separately.
  3. Breadth needs shared memory. Cross-channel features become defensible only when their combined learning improves the next decision. Otherwise, platform owners can absorb each feature.

Overview

Lapis is an active Fall 2025 YC company building software for paid advertising. Its current product combines brand ingestion, ad creation, campaign workflows, matched landing pages, and performance learning. YC identifies Varunram Ganesh and Sai Surbehera as its founders.[1]

This is not a startup post-mortem. The public record is too young and too company-authored to support a verdict about success or failure. What it does show is a fast product expansion from AI-search analytics into a broad paid-growth system. That breadth is the central question, not a documented cause of decline.

Founding Story

YC lists Lapis as founded in 2025 by Ganesh, its CEO, and Surbehera, its CTO. The directory describes Ganesh as a former head of growth at Warp and Surbehera as a former machine-learning engineer at Walmart Tech.[1] No independent founder profile or interview was found in this bounded review, so their working relationship, initial financing, and exact origin story remain unavailable.

The earliest first-party product record located is a YC Launch page for AI-search analytics. It described monitoring answers from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Grok, then changing site content and technical SEO in response.[2] The public record does not explain why the company moved toward paid advertising. No verified direct founder quotation about that decision was located.

Timeline

  • 2025: YC records Lapis as founded and part of its Fall 2025 batch.[1]
  • Late 2025, approximate: A YC Launch page presented Lapis as an AI-search analytics platform.[2]
  • July 2026: The live site presented an expanded paid-growth platform with public self-serve pricing.[3]

What They Built

The current product starts with a company website. Lapis extracts a reviewable brand profile, then generates channel-formatted ads that users can edit with natural-language instructions, vary, save, and export. Its support guide documents five initial ad generations and platform selection for Meta, Google, LinkedIn, and TikTok.[4]

The homepage groups the broader system into ChatSense for LLM advertising, OmniSense for paid-channel creative and experiments, and RapidDomain for matched landing pages. Managed plans add campaign operation and a strategist, with customer approvals and budget guardrails.[3] These are first-party product descriptions, not audited evidence that the system improves returns.

Market Position

Target Customers

The public offer targets marketing teams that run paid acquisition but lack enough creative capacity or coordination across ads and landing pages. Basic and Pro self-serve tiers point to smaller teams; managed plans point toward larger budgets.

Market Size

No defensible market-size estimate tied to Lapis's actual customer segment was found. The company participates in several large categories, including ad creative, campaign management, landing-page experimentation, and marketing analytics, but summing those categories would exaggerate its reachable market.

Competition

Lapis competes with creative generators, ad-platform tooling, agencies, and the native automation inside Google and Meta. Its proposed advantage is cross-platform memory: one brand context carried from creative through landing page and measurement. The structural risk is that platform owners control delivery data and can bundle adjacent generation features at little extra cost.

Business Model

Lapis lists a free tier, Basic at $99 per month, Pro at $599 per month, and custom managed plans.[3] This mixes software margins with service-heavy work. The managed offer may improve trust and adoption, but strategist time can also cap margins and make results difficult to attribute to software alone. Revenue, gross margin, customer acquisition cost, and retention are not public.

Traction

The current homepage claims more than 1,500 marketing teams; an earlier YC Launch page claimed more than 100 startup customers for the search-analytics product.[3][2] These claims refer to different product periods and may not describe the same cohort. No independent customer count, paid conversion figure, revenue, or measured advertising lift was located.

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