Hopper: infrastructure company

Overview

Hopper is a San Francisco inference company in Y Combinator's Fall 2026 batch that optimizes, serves and post-trains open-weight speech and language models for real-time voice agent companies.

Reality check

Latency claims (company-claimed, Oct 2026)

Claims 80 ms time to first token on Gemma 4 31B, 150 ms time to first audio on Qwen 3 TTS, and Nemotron 3.5 ASR at twice the speed of Deepgram Nova-3.

Verified record

Verified deployments: None on file
Active incidents: None on file

Key facts

Service model (company-stated)

Post-trains open-source STT, TTS and speech LLMs on customers' production calls, then serves and improves them against live traffic.

Data & sources

Web sources

2

2 sources backing this record.View all →

Current leadership (2)

Pavan Katta Co-founder and CEOsecondary-verified
Jashwanth Pedapudi Co-founder and CTOsecondary-verified

Founders (2)

Pavan Kattacofounder
Jashwanth Pedapudicofounder

See all founders across the registry →

Safety record

No incidents on record for Hopper.

Only active incidents are counted. Retracted incidents are excluded from this summary but remain reachable at their canonical URLs.

Full safety record: incidents, sourcing, and exposure data →

Mentioned on (6)

Registry pages whose text names Hopper.

Companies (4)

Nebius, CoreWeave, Baidu AI Cloud, Voltage Park

People (2)

Jashwanth Pedapudi, Pavan Katta

Financial state

Employees: 2as of 2026-10-27(reported)

Each numeric field carries its own basis marker. Aggregators report a number; this surface preserves the source class so verification depth travels with the value.

Recent activity

Every change to this record is dated, sourced, and independently verified where marked.

Record createdOct 27, 2026
Added to the verified registry

Full change history →

Sources (2)

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/hopper · 2026-10-27
https://withhopper.com/ · 2026-10-27

Common questions

What is Hopper?

Hopper is a San Francisco inference company in Y Combinator's Fall 2026 batch that optimizes, serves and post-trains open-weight speech and language models for real-time voice agent companies.

What does Hopper make?

Hopper has no robot models recorded on the DEPLOY registry.

Is Hopper publicly traded?

No. Hopper is privately held and not publicly traded, per the DEPLOY registry.

Who is the CEO of Hopper?

Pavan Katta is the ceo of Hopper, per the DEPLOY registry.

How can I invest in Hopper?

Hopper is a private company; its shares are not available on public markets, so retail investors cannot buy the stock today.

Where is Hopper headquartered?

Hopper is headquartered in San Francisco, CA, USA.

Who owns Hopper?

Hopper is privately held; ownership sits with its founders and private investors.

Is Hopper a top robotics company?

On DEPLOY's intelligence score, which blends verified deployments, funding, hiring, media, safety, and IP signals, Hopper ranks in roughly the top 88% of companies tracked by the registry.

When was Hopper founded?

Hopper was founded in 2026.

Is Hopper safe?

Hopper has no incidents on record in the DEPLOY registry. This does not constitute a safety guarantee; it reflects the incidents DEPLOY has tracked and verified to date.

Methodology: Unreviewed · 2 sources (no primary) · last reviewed 2026-10-27

Verification posture

Unreviewed

Low confidence

Review state

Stable

Last reviewed 2026-10-27

Sources by quality tier

2: unclassified; Unclassified source

The framework is documented at /methodology. Corrections at /corrections. Reviewer: DEPLOY editorial team.

No press coverage on file for Hopper yet. Coverage appears here automatically as articles are ingested from our press sources.

Machine-readable surfaces

Markdown mirror: /companies/hopper-inference.md
RSS feed: /companies/hopper-inference/feed.xml
JSON-LD: embedded in this page’s head
REST API: /v1/companies/6800b503-8ced-4f2b-8015-cd77e18727ca
Revision history: /companies/hopper-inference/history
Data documentation: /data
Query this programmatically: Deploy MCP

Reality vs attention

Not enough verified signal yet to place Hopper against peers. Reality and attention percentiles publish once the underlying record clears its data floor.

6-month trend

Peer rankingTop 88% of category

vs funding peers-40.3 ptsbelow funding-adj. expected

Analysis

Limited public visibility and press coverage relative to peers.

Dimension breakdown

Verified signal

Insufficient data

Insufficient data

Insufficient data

Insufficient data

Insufficient data

Attention (reach, not merit)

Market Presence →

0.0LOW

DEPLOY Intelligence scores are computed from verified registry data: confirmed deployments, disclosed funding rounds, regulatory filings, active job listings, video viewership, and press coverage. Confidence ratings reflect data availability. Scores update nightly.

DEPLOY Indices — verified vs claimed

Claim Integrity Fleet Reality Operator Repeat All indices

Last computed: Nov 3, 2026

Methodology Intelligence layer