Cardboard YC Application

Winter 2026Active

Cardboard 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: B2B
Team size: 4
Status: Active
Launched: 2026

Founders

Saksham AggarwalFounder
Ishan SharmaFounder

What Cardboard does

Cardboard is an agentic video editor for growth/marketing teams and serious creators who need to ship videos consistently. Instead of agencies, long timelines, and infinite review cycles, teams give cardboard a footage + a goal (“3 variants”, “30s hook”, “testimonials”) to get a strong first cut in minutes on which they can iterate quickly. Multimodal LLMs can finally reason over footage, and WebGPU/WebCodecs make a real NLE possible in the browser. For the first time, an “AI director” inside a professional editor can be a reality. We have to build two hard things at once: a high-performance editor in the browser and an agentic editor that is reliable for production use cases. Most startups do one; incumbents can’t rebuild their stack without breaking everything. Saksham and Ishan met in school and have known each other since 15 years. Saksham was Co-founder/CTO of Iterate AI (backed by EF) and posts content on social media; Ishan has spent ~5yr building memory-heavy, performance-critical browser apps at HackerRank (S11) and deeply understands browsers. He has built Hotspoter (5M+ downloads) when he was 14. Together, we’re unusually suited to build the editor core others avoid. Video is becoming the default distribution channel, and the team that iterates fastest compounds attention. Cardboard becomes the default workspace for video production, the way Canva/Figma became the workspace for design - because it’s collaborative, fast, and does the tedious parts for you.

Cardboard's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

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

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Cardboard

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Agentic video editor

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

We are building an agentic video editor designed for marketing and growth teams who need to ship videos quickly and consistently. Instead of agencies and slow review cycles, users upload footage with a goal like "3 variants" or "30s hook" and get a strong first cut in minutes. Our product leverages multimodal LLMs to reason over footage, combined with a high-performance non-linear editor fully in the browser using WebGPU/WebCodecs technology. This allows real-time AI-guided edits that professionals can iterate on rapidly.

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

We live in San Francisco, CA, and plan to keep the company based here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

We're in San Francisco because it's where we live and where the ecosystem and talent for browser and AI tech is strongest. It also positions us close to many potential customers in marketing and media tech.

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 Cardboard YC application?

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