Alpha Research YC Application

Spring 2025Active

Alpha Research went through Y Combinator in the Spring 2025 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: Spring 2025
Industry: B2BEngineering, Product and Design
Team size: 1
Status: Active
Launched: 2025

Founders

Ryan PrendergastFounder

What Alpha Research does

Alpha Research builds open source agentic knowledge bases. Our mission is to help knowledge workers work 100x faster. We launched and open sourced our first platform, Alpha Book on a mirror of the Project Gutenberg dataset (75,000 books). Knowledge work is bottlenecked in two key ways: finding evidence and testing hypotheses. We make both 100x faster. We extend keyword search and RAG with general coding agents, which use filesystem tools like ripgrep and reason iteratively to find broad evidence. Coding agents also write ad-hoc scripts to label datasets and test hypotheses. Our timeline is simple: repeat Alpha Book across every public dataset of humanity's knowledge. Next we'll launch Alpha Econ with US Census, BLS, NBER, etc datasets. Alpha Justice with US Supreme Court Cases, and so on. We support museums, research libraries, historical societies, and archives. We also do custom integration work for enterprise.

Alpha Research's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Alpha Research, Spring 2025 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Alpha Research

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Open source agentic knowledge bases

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

We build open source agentic knowledge bases to help knowledge workers find evidence and test hypotheses 100x faster. Our first product, Alpha Book, applies coding agents on a mirror of Project Gutenberg to conduct broad, iterative searches and generate ad-hoc scripts that label data and test ideas. Next, we'll apply this approach to datasets like US Census, Supreme Court cases, and more, serving researchers, libraries, and enterprises with custom integrations.

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

We live and work in New York, NY, and plan to base the company here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

New York is where both founders are currently based and connected to the research and knowledge ecosystems we serve. We want to remain close to those communities and the data sources we target.

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 Alpha Research YC application?

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