Certus AI YC Application

Summer 2025Active

Certus AI went through Y Combinator in the Summer 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: Summer 2025
Industry: B2B
Team size: 3
Status: Active
Launched: 2025

Founders

Gurveer SinghFounder
Adam GamieldienFounder
Isaac NicholsFounder

What Certus AI does

Certus AI is replacing the restaurant phone line with Voice AI. Restaurants lose up to $100,000 per year per location from missed calls, lost orders, and abandoned hold lines. Staff are overwhelmed. IVRs frustrate customers. Call centers are expensive and impersonal. It’s 2025. Guests don’t leave voicemails or wait on hold. They just move on. Certus is an AI voice agent built for restaurants. It answers every call, 24/7 - taking orders, processing deliveries, booking reservations, upselling, and handling complaints in English, Spanish, French and more. Certus is built to manage the phone line end to end, from the customer call to the restaurant tech stack, with zero human intervention required. It currently integrates with industry-leading systems like Toast, Square, Clover, UberEats, DoorDash, and more. We’re building the voice layer of the modern restaurant - the employee they’ll never fire. We started Certus because we lived the pain. Gurveer (CEO) grew up answering phones in his family’s restaurant and helped operate them, growing from 1 to 11 locations in 7 years. Later, he and Adam (CRO) ran a restaurant growth startup to help others increase revenue, but kept watching clients bleed cash because no one picked up the phone. So we built the solution the industry always wished existed. Until now, this problem was considered unsolvable. But Voice AI has finally crossed the conversational chasm and 72% of consumers now prefer AI over humans as long as it means faster and better service. More importantly, the market is begging for this. The North American restaurant industry crossed $1 trillion in 2024, and it's projected to hit $1.5 trillion in 2025. Yet over $100 billion is still lost annually to missed calls, human error, and outdated tech. As the market continues to grow, so do the losses! Our customers say it best: - “Certus changed my life overnight.” - “We were losing the ability to give great in-house service - the phone was killing us.” - “70% of my business comes through the phone. That’s mine and my 16 staffs livelihood.” - “Before Certus, I used to lose 40 - 60 calls a day…. now my printer just stays printing!” - “I’ve been in the business 38 years. I’ve been waiting for this since then.” Certus is here to fix the $120B phone problem - one call at a time. And in doing so, we’re redefining how the restaurant industry communicates forever, starting with the phone line.

Certus AI's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Certus AI, Summer 2025 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Certus AI

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Replacing the restaurant phone line with Voice AI

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

We built an AI voice agent that answers restaurant phone calls 24/7, handling orders, deliveries, reservations, upselling, and complaints without human intervention. It integrates with systems like Toast, Square, Clover, UberEats, and DoorDash, managing the entire phone line interaction end to end.

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

We all live in San Francisco, CA, and the company would remain based here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

We live here because of the proximity to tech talent, restaurant innovators, and YC itself. San Francisco gives us access to partners and potential customers in restaurant 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 Certus AI YC application?

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