Ascii YC Application

Fall 2026Active

Paris

Ascii went through Y Combinator in the Fall 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: Fall 2026
Industry: B2BInfrastructure
Location: Paris
Team size: 3
Status: Active
Launched: 2026

Founders

Anicet NougaretFounder/CEO
KirillFounder/CTO

What Ascii does

**Problem** Humans used to need laptops to do their work. Now they prompt agents instead, and those agents need computers too: always-on, in large quantities, and with unlimited capabilities. Building and maintaining that yourself is far from trivial. **Solution** Box provides powerful, simple, permissive Ubuntu VMs in the cloud. In a box, an agent can work for long periods on code or on knowledge work like legal, research, reporting, and auditing. **Why Box and not any other cloud VM?** 1. It is ready out of the box: every box ships with a desktop, chrome, languages, docker, snapshots, and templates, plus a CLI, SDK, API, and control pane for your fleet. 2. It is permissive and paradigm agnostic: any number of agents can use any number of boxes. Agents can run inside or use boxes as an external tool. 3. It is expertly crafted: we manage everything from the individual CPU to the orchestration software, which makes boxes stable, persistent, scalable, and secure. 4. It is the best performance and price in town: our CPUs rank first on HPC benchmarks, and boxes are typically 9x to 18x cheaper than other leading sandboxes. **Further notes** Boxes are hosted in Europe, which keeps prices low, and more regions are coming. Unless compliance requires it, agents don't notice the region they run in.

Ascii's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Ascii, Fall 2026 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Ascii

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Cloud VMs for agents - fast, cheap, always on.

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

We're building Box - a cloud VM platform made for billions of software agents. It gives agents real, persistent Ubuntu machines with everything pre-installed: desktop, browser, languages, Docker, snapshots, and a code interface. Agents use Box for long-running work like coding, research, or reporting. We provide the VM, the orchestration, and all the interfaces (CLI, SDK, API) to manage fleets at agent scale.

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

We're based in Paris and remote across Europe. The company would stay remote after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

We host in Europe because it keeps prices low and close to our first users. Remote helps us move fast and hire anywhere.

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 Ascii YC application?

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