Cinder YC Application

Winter 2022Active

Cinder went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2022 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 2022
Industry: B2BSecurity
Team size: 30
Status: Active
Launched: 2022

Founders

Phil Brennan
Glen Wise

What Cinder does

From content moderation to AI safety, Cinder empowers businesses to orchestrate and automate digital safety at scale. Cinder was founded to help organizations foster safe online spaces for everyone. Our platform empowers companies from start-ups to enterprises with end-to-end capabilities to mitigate harm, investigate abuse, and produce trustworthy and reliable AI outcomes. Building your world-class company means keeping your users and community safe - Cinder unlocks faster growth by making safety easy. We work with customers in every industry from frontier AI labs to e-commerce and social media. We're hiring across a variety of teams and looking for candidates based in NYC or open to relocating to NYC, and able to work in-person.

Cinder's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Cinder, Winter 2022 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Cinder

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Infrastructure to protect companies from AI abuse

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

We build a platform that helps companies automate and manage digital safety around AI. Our product detects and mitigates AI misuse and abuse for industries from AI labs to social media and e-commerce, enabling harm investigation and safer AI outcomes.

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

We live and work in New York City, and the company is based there after YC as well.

Explain your decision regarding location.

We chose NYC because it's our home, and it's a hub for the industries we serve, with talent and customers nearby. We also want to build an in-person culture to scale safety teams effectively.

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 Cinder YC application?

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