Kampala bets request-layer reverse engineering beats brittle UI automation

Zatanna, a three-person startup from Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch, sells Kampala: a man-in-the-middle proxy that intercepts traffic from websites, mobile apps, and desktop software and reconstructs request flows into stable, replayable API endpoints. The pitch is that agents should automate below the UI — at the request layer — instead of through brittle browser automation or computer-use agents.

The company did not start as a dev tool. It began in dental tech, building a voice-agent front-desk assistant, where founders Alex Blackwell and Tarun Vedula had to integrate with insurance payer dashboards and legacy practice-management systems that offered no APIs. They built an internal MITM proxy to spin up these integrations quickly, and as it matured — used for conference attendee scraping, property-management connections, and automating Yardi billing entry — they realized the tooling was the business.

Kampala launched on Hacker News on April 16, 2026, drawing 100 points and 84 comments, and The Agent Times covered it the next day. Its key differentiators are fingerprint preservation (keeping the intercepted app's HTTP/TLS fingerprint so anti-bot systems see the original client) and automatic auth-chain mapping. The product is available on macOS with a Windows waitlist; a reported $500K seed from Y Combinator and LeapYear remains unconfirmed, as does any revenue figure.