AirCaps YC Application

Fall 2025Active

AirCaps went through Y Combinator in the Fall 2025 batch as a Consumer 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: Fall 2025
Industry: Consumer
Team size: 5
Status: Active
Launched: 2025

Founders

Madhav LavakareFounder
Nirbhay NarangFounder

What AirCaps does

AirCaps is bringing AI assistance to in-person conversations. Our AI-copilot provides live captions, translations, AI meeting notes and insights for in-person conversations in real-time. It's deployed as an app for lightweight AR glasses so you can see visual information overlaid onto your field of vision. You can think of it like a Zoom AI meeting assistant or Granola, but for in-person conversations, and with the ability to proactively help you in real-time, not just after the conversation. We’re building the capture and intelligence layer for the 216 billion daily conversations that happen face-to-face. We’ve already processed 16,500 hours of real-world conversations and counting. Today, AirCaps assists with 11% of our users’ in-person conversations. We did $93K in revenue in October and grew 6.5x from September while spending <$3K on marketing (and hit $70K in revenue in the first 2 weeks of November). Our power users average 6h+ daily usage and our day-30 retention is 91%. We previously went viral (75M+ views on TikTok, 150K+ followers) and have been featured by The New Yorker, WIRED, and Forbes. Madhav (CEO, Yale CS) has been building in audio and AR since age 13, starting with Google Glass apps and voice assistants for Raspberry Pis. He researched audio AI at the MIT Media Lab. Nirbhay (CTO, Cornell CS) built voice AI on smart glasses in high school and built conversational AI products as the first engineer at 2 YC startups.

AirCaps's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

AirCaps, Fall 2025 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

AirCaps

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

AI copilot for in-person conversations

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

We build an AI assistant that helps with live captions, translations, meeting notes, and insights during in-person conversations. It runs on lightweight AR glasses and overlays relevant information in real-time, helping users understand and follow complex discussions as they happen, not just after.

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

We live in San Francisco, CA. The company will be based here after YC as well.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco is where our team already lives and where the AR and AI ecosystems are strong. It's the right place to iterate quickly with early users and hardware partners.

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 AirCaps YC application?

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