Launch HN: Kampala (YC W26) – Reverse-Engineer Apps into APIs

Hey! I am Alex and together with my co-founder Tarun built Kampala (https://www.zatanna.ai/kampala https://www.zatanna.ai/kampala). It’s a man-in-the-middle (MITM) style proxy that allows you to agentically reverse engineer existing workflows without brittle browser automation or computer use agents. It works for websites, mobile apps, desktop apps. Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_PeostC-b4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_PeostC-b4. Many people spend hours per day in legacy dashboards and on-prem solutions reconciling data across platforms. Current attempts at automation use browser automations or computer use agents which are brittle, slow, and nondeterministic. I come from a web reverse engineering background and spent the last 7-8 years building integrations by hand for sneaker/ticket releases, sportsbooks logins, and everything in\ between. During that time I consulted for several companies and brought them off of browser based infrastructure into the requests layer. When we started Zatanna (that’s our company name) we worked in dental tech, which meant we had to deal with tons of insurance payer dashboards and legacy dental-practice solutions. Our superpower (as a fairly undifferentiated voice agent/front desk assistant company) was that we could integrate with nearly any system requested. During this time we built extensive tooling (including what we’re now calling Kampala) to allow us to spin up these integrations quickly. Existing MITM proxies and tooling didn’t work for a few reasons: (1) They manipulated the TLS and HTTP2 fingerprint over the wire which was detected by strict anti-bots. (2) They had bad MCPs which did not adequately expose necessary features like scripts/replay. (3) They did not allow for building workflows or actions given a sample or sequence of requests. As the tools we built got more powerful, we began to use them internally to scrape conference attendees, connect to external PMS systems, and interact with slack apps. I even sent it to my property manager mom, who (with a lot of help from me lol), automated 2-3 hours of billing information entry in Yardi. At that point we realized that this wasn’t really about dentistry :) Because Kampala is a MITM, it is able to leverage existing session tokens/anti-bot cookies and automate things deterministically in seconds. You can either use our agent harness that directly creates scripts/apis by prompting you with what actions to make, or our MCP by manually doing a workflow once, and asking your preferred coding agent to use Kampala to make a script/API to replicate it. Once you have an API/script, you can export, run, or even have us host it for you. We think the future of automation does not consist of sending screenshots of webpages to LLMs, but instead using the layer below that computers actually understand. Excited to hear your thoughts/questions/feedback!