Bonfire YC Application

Winter 2015Acquired

Bonfire went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2015 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 2015
Industry: B2BFinance and Accounting
Team size: 95
Status: Acquired
Launched: 2014

Founders

Corry FlattFounder/CEO
Alex MillarFounder/CTO

What Bonfire does

Bonfire is the leading next-generation eSourcing / competitive bidding and RFx platform. Bonfire goes beyond the basic automation of eProcurement suites and older simple bidding tools, helping you to make better, faster decisions. It’s a collaborative, powerful, and insightful cloud-based platform for today’s procurement needs. We're focused on government procurement teams (which control ~18% of GDP) and enabling them to thrive in a world of crushing compliance requirements and very high workloads. Bonfire streamlines the entire RFx and bidding process, helping to run projects >50% faster. Bonfire empowers users with unparalleled evaluation features for deeper analysis, delivered through our distinctly intuitive and easy-to-use platform. Bonfire is trusted with over a billion dollars of supplier selection decisions per month, and is one of the fastest growing new procurement technologies.

Bonfire's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Bonfire, Winter 2015 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Bonfire

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

RFPs and bidding platform for government procurement

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

We have built a cloud-based platform that simplifies and speeds up competitive bidding, RFx, and supplier evaluation for government procurement teams. It replaces manual, complex, and slow processes with a collaborative tool that makes running and analyzing bids faster and clearer.

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

We live and operate in Ontario, Canada, and would base the company there after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

Ontario is where we are based and have built our core network of customers. Staying here keeps us close to our users and government procurement teams.

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 Bonfire YC application?

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