Cloudant YC Application

Summer 2008Acquired

Cloudant went through Y Combinator in the Summer 2008 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 2008
Industry: B2BInfrastructure
Team size: 51
Status: Acquired
Launched: 2012

Founders

Michael MillerFounder/Chief Scientist
Alan HoffmanFounder/Director of Product
Adam KocoloskiFounder/CTO

What Cloudant does

Cloudant's distributed database-as-a-service (DBaaS) allows developers of fast-growing web and mobile apps to focus on building and improving their products, instead of worrying about scaling and managing their databases on their own. We manage and distribute your data globally so you can grow more users, build more app features, and sleep more knowing we're keeping the servers up and humming. Cloudant was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2008 by three MIT physicists who at the time were moving multi-petabyte data sets around from the Large Hadron Collider. Frustrated by the available tools for managing and analyzing Big Data in their research, the founders built a distributed, fault-tolerant, globally scalable data layer on top of Apache CouchDB. The service has grown since then. The team now manages and serves mobile and web app data on behalf of thousands of developers and hundreds of customers to their users around the world. In 2014, the company was acquired by a global enterprise software & hardware vendor.

Cloudant's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Cloudant, Summer 2008 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Cloudant

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

NoSQL Database-as-a-Service

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

We built a distributed, fault-tolerant, globally scalable NoSQL database service based on Apache CouchDB. Our product manages data for fast-growing web and mobile apps, handling scaling and server operations so developers can focus on their apps, not database infrastructure.

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

We live in Boston, MA, and the company is based here as well.

Explain your decision regarding location.

We are based here because the founders all started in Cambridge, MA working on large scientific data problems, and the local tech community supports our work. It's where we built the first versions of the product and found early users.

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 Cloudant YC application?

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