AppHarbor YC Application

Name: Round Funded
Price: 99.00 USD
Availability: InStock

Profile updated September 9, 2026Winter 2011Inactive

San Francisco, CA, USA

AppHarbor went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2011 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 2011
Industry: B2BInfrastructure
Location: San Francisco, CA, USA
Team size: 1
Status: Inactive
Launched: 2012

Founders

Rune SoerensenFounder/CEO
Michael FriisFounder
Troels ThomsenFounder

What AppHarbor does

AppHarbor is a.NET Platform-as-a-Service. Developers push code to AppHarbor using either Git or Mercurial. AppHarbor then builds the code and runs any unit tests. If everything checks out, the code is deployed to AppHarbor's scalable cloud platform. AppHarbor lets developers spend their time coming up with ideas and developing applications, not patching servers, worrying about deployment, messing with configuration files, or scaling. At AppHarbor, we believe that developing and deploying.NET application should be simple and fun. AppHarbor has been designed to tie in with developers day-to-day workflows. Deploying a new version to AppHarbor is as simple as checking in code when a new feature is ready. AppHarbor will run most ASP.NET applications without modification. Moving an application to our platform requires no AppHarbor-specific code modifications nor installation of plugins or other custom software. We believe developers should be able to move applications and data to different cloud-vendors with as little friction as possible. AppHarbor believes in giving developers access to an open ecosystem of addons and 3rd party services, not just the ones we decide to provide ourselves.

AppHarbor's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

AppHarbor, Winter 2011 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

AppHarbor

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

.NET Cloud Platform as a Service

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

We're building a.NET Platform-as-a-Service that lets developers push code using Git or Mercurial. It builds the code, runs unit tests, and deploys to our scalable cloud if everything passes. It runs most ASP.NET apps without any changes or plugins so developers can deploy by just committing their code.

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

We live in San Francisco, CA, and the company would be based here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco has the technical talent and access to customers we want to reach. Being here keeps us close to the developer community we serve and to other startups working in cloud infrastructure.

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 AppHarbor YC application?

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