Captain YC Application

Winter 2026Active

Captain went through Y Combinator in the Winter 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: Winter 2026
Industry: B2BInfrastructure
Team size: 2
Status: Active
Launched: 2025

Founders

Lewis PolanskyCEO/Co-Founder
Edgar BabajanyanCo-Founder and CTO

What Captain does

Captain delivers the most accurate file search engine built for AI agents. We’ll index data from the sources folks already use like S3, SharePoint, and Google Drive, and easily scale multimodal, petabyte-level content search. We’re the Snowflake for Unstructured Data. Captain tops the Open-RAG-Benchmark with over 20% higher accuracy than standard RAG pipelines. We achieve this through robust data processing techniques like embedding normalization across modalities, ensuring that representations cluster by semantic content rather than data type.

Captain's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Captain, Winter 2026 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Captain

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

AI agents' accurate knowledge search at scale

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

We're building Captain, a file search engine optimized for AI agents that indexes data from places like S3, SharePoint, and Google Drive. It scales to petabyte-level, multimodal content and improves retrieval accuracy by normalizing embeddings across modalities so the AI focuses on semantic meaning rather than format. This solves the problem of unreliable, noisy knowledge retrieval for AI workflows tied to unstructured data.

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

We live in San Francisco and the company will remain based here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco has the best access to engineering talent and AI infrastructure. It's where our users and partners are, so it makes sense for us to stay 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 Captain YC application?

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