Atla YC Application

Summer 2023Inactive

Atla went through Y Combinator in the Summer 2023 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: Summer 2023
Industry: B2B
Team size: 10
Status: Inactive
Launched: 2023

Founders

Maurice BurgerFounder
Roman EngelerFounder

What Atla does

Find and fix your agent’s most critical failures in hours, not days. Atla helps developers cut time spent on manually reviewing traces. Atla’s LLM judge evaluates your agent step-by-step, uncovers error patterns across runs, and suggests specific fixes - so you know exactly what to fix and why. Atla supports the most popular agent frameworks teams build with, including LangChain, CrewAI, and OpenAI Agents. With real-time monitoring, automated error detection, and prompt experimentation, Atla gives teams the visibility and control needed to confidently ship agentic systems that work. We’re a team of researchers, engineers, entrepreneurs and operational leaders. Our expertise in evals was honed through training our own purpose-built LLM Judges, Selene and Selene Mini, which are available open-source and have been downloaded 60,000+ times.

Atla's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Atla, Summer 2023 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Atla

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

The improvement engine for AI agents

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

We build Atla, a tool that automatically detects and diagnoses failures in AI agents. It uses purpose-built LLM judges to review agent runs step-by-step, surfaces error patterns, and suggests specific fixes so developers can find and fix issues in hours instead of days.

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

We live and work in London, England, and plan to keep the company based here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

We're based in London because that's where our team is and where we're building strong technical leadership. The local talent and ecosystem suit us well and YC can help us scale globally from here.

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 Atla YC application?

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