Caution YC Application

Summer 2026Active

George Town

Caution went through Y Combinator in the Summer 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: Summer 2026
Industry: B2BInfrastructure
Location: George Town
Team size: 5
Status: Active
Launched: 2026

Founders

Anton LivajaFounder/CEO
Ksenia LeskoFounder
Lance VickFounder/CTO

What Caution does

Caution is a hosting platform for software you can't afford to get hacked. It simplifies and extends confidential compute, and lets developers deploy workloads to secure enclaves in minutes and give customers, auditors, and counterparties cryptographic proof that production is running the exact reviewed source code, build, configuration, and runtime - not an opaque binary controlled by a cloud operator or internal admin. Confidential computing hardware exists, but the tooling is too fragmented and incomplete for most teams to use well. Today, attestation often proves only that a binary has a certain hash; it does not prove what source code produced that binary. Building the missing deployment, reproducibility, and verification layer requires specialized security engineering and often locks teams into one cloud or hardware stack. Caution turns that into a simple git-based workflow that builds reproducible enclave images, provisions infrastructure, and lets anyone independently verify what is running. We built Caution after years securing high-risk systems through Distrust, where we worked with hedge funds, custodians, blockchain teams, cloud platforms, and critical grid operators on systems responsible for more than $600B in assets. Again and again, the same problem showed up: teams running mission-critical infrastructure could not reliably prove what was executing in production. As AI, fintech, healthcare, and regulated data collaboration move into the cloud, "trust us" is no longer enough. Caution is a general-purpose platform: if it runs on a server, it can run verifiably on Caution. We're starting where trust failures cost the most, but we believe verifiable compute will become the default way software runs, the same way HTTPS became the default way it's served. Infrastructure you can verify, not trust.

Caution's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Caution, Summer 2026 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Caution

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Hosting for software you can't afford to have hacked

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

Caution is a hosting platform for running workloads in secure enclaves. Developers deploy code to confidential compute hardware, get cryptographic proof of what's running, and let customers or auditors independently verify production matches the reviewed source, build, and config. We manage the build, reproducibility, and attestation, and provide a git-based workflow so infra teams don't have to be low-level security experts to get real verifiability.

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

We are based in George Town, Cayman Islands now, and will keep the company based there after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

We set up in George Town for regulatory and legal reasons. The Cayman Islands is a known international base for infrastructure, fintech, and security-focused startups.

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 Caution YC application?

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