Y Combinator's bet on killing tokenmaxxing just landed a $13.5M seed round as corporate America calls time on AI waste

San Francisco startup Weave raised $13.5 million in Series A funding led by Standard Capital with Y Combinator participating, Business Insider reported on July 28. The company, founded by Andrew Churchill and Adam Cohen, builds software that measures engineering output from AI tools and routes work to the most cost-effective models. The funding arrives as large enterprises push back against uncontrolled AI spending. The Associated Press reported this week that the spring trend of "tokenmaxxing" -- treating heavy token consumption as a proxy for productivity -- is facing a summer backlash. Yahoo Finance, citing Bloomberg and The Information, reported in June that Uber exhausted its planned 2026 AI coding budget in four months and capped spending on tools such as Cursor and Claude Code at $1,500 per tool per employee each month. TechTimes reported that Tesla plans to cap third-party AI tool spending at $200 a week starting July 6 while exempting Elon Musk's xAI products. Vincent Gusdorf, head of AI analytics at Moody's Ratings, told the AP that "it's very easy to create something you don't need with AI." Business Insider reported that Weave's platform is used by 20,000 engineers across more than 500 companies including Robinhood and PostHog. The startup's software produces a consolidated output score showing how much faster AI makes a team, how quality is affected, and what it costs.