Aemon YC Application

Winter 2026Active

Aemon went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2026 batch as a B2B company. Below: what the company does, who founded it, and its application to YC, reconstructed question by question in the real YC form.

YC batch: Winter 2026
Industry: B2B
Team size: 3
Status: Active
Launched: 2026

Founders

Richard ZhouFounder
Ray XuFounder

What Aemon does

Aemon is the first autonomous research engineer that delivers state-of-the-art solutions to your engineering problems. It generates, tests, and evolves thousands of approaches at machine speed to discover optimal solutions beyond what human experts can find. Aemon already set a new world record on an NP-hard math optimization problem with <$10 of compute, beating the previous record set by Google DeepMind in 2025. Ray and Richard (twin brothers) dropped out of UWaterloo and UIUC to build Aemon. They published at top AI conferences like ICLR and EMNLP before turning 20.

Aemon's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Aemon, Winter 2026 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Aemon

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

The Forward-Deployed AI Research Engineer

What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.

We built an autonomous AI research engineer that generates, tests, and evolves thousands of solutions to engineering problems at machine speed. Our system finds optimal solutions beyond human experts, currently demonstrated by setting a world record on an NP-hard math optimization problem with under $10 of compute, beating Google DeepMind's previous record.

Where do you live now, and where would the company be based after YC?

We're currently based in San Francisco, CA, and will remain here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco is the center of the AI and startup ecosystem where we can best network, recruit, and refine our product alongside other AI companies and engineers.

21 more answers in the full application

Founders, Progress, Idea, Equity, Curious, Batch Preference are in the full version. Create a free account to open it in YC Insights, next to every other YC batch.

See full application

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this the real Aemon YC application?

No. Y Combinator keeps submitted applications private. This is a reconstruction: the real YC form questions, answered from Aemon's public data (launch notes, founder backgrounds, product description). It shows how a company like Aemon would present itself to YC, not the text they submitted.