Cardamon YC Application

Winter 2025Active

Cardamon went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2025 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 2025
Industry: B2BFinance and Accounting
Team size: 2
Status: Active
Launched: 2025

Founders

Areg NzsdejanFounder
Dmytro AstakhovFounder

What Cardamon does

Cardamon is an AI powered platform that ingests relevant regulation, understands what applies to each regulated financial firm, and gets compliance officers from regulation, to obligations, to product requirements in minutes - not weeks. Financial firms face a host of complex regulations that make it incredibly painful to launch and maintain products in a compliant way. As a Product team at Revolut, we felt this pain deeply ourselves - we had products ready to launch but stuck in compliance limbo, often for weeks. Turns out, getting compliant took as long as building the product itself. Frustrated, we dug in and were shocked by how manual and inefficient the processes were. That’s when it clicked: there’s a huge opportunity to automate the boring stuff (and solve our own problem!). Compliance teams win because they ditch the tedious tasks. Product teams win because they ship faster. Everyone’s happy.

Cardamon's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Cardamon, Winter 2025 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Cardamon

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

AI compliance co-pilot for regulated finance

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

We built an AI platform that reads complex financial regulations, figures out which rules apply to each firm, and helps compliance officers turn those rules into clear obligations and product requirements in minutes instead of weeks.

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

We live in London, United Kingdom, and will base the company here after YC as well.

Explain your decision regarding location.

We picked London because it's where we live and where most of our early contacts and customers are, given it's a major financial center with a lot of regulated firms struggling with compliance complexity.

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 Cardamon YC application?

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