Cardinal Gray YC Application

Summer 2023Active

Cardinal Gray went through Y Combinator in the Summer 2023 batch as a Fintech 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: FintechCredit and Lending
Team size: 6
Status: Active
Launched: 2023

Founders

Jack ChapmanFounder
Muhammad KhattakFounder
Grant PeaseFounder

What Cardinal Gray does

When a lender gives out a car loan, they need to file a lien with their borrower’s DMV. This is difficult because the process varies by state and county. We’ve leveraged LLMs to help lenders automate lien filings for over $1B of loans.

Cardinal Gray's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

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

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Cardinal Gray

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Automating lenders' interactions with the DMV

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

We built a platform that automates filing car loan liens with the DMV for lenders. The lien filing process varies wildly by state and county, which makes it manual and error-prone. Our product uses large language models to handle this complexity and automate filings for over $1 billion in loans so far.

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

We live in New York, NY, and the company is based here. After YC, we plan to continue operating from New York.

Explain your decision regarding location.

New York is where our team is located and where many of our early customers are. It's a major lending and finance hub, so it makes sense for us to keep building 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 Cardinal Gray YC application?

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