Coldreach YC Application

Winter 2023Active

Coldreach went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2023 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 2023
Industry: B2BSales
Team size: 3
Status: Active
Launched: 2023

Founders

Xiaohan ShenFounder
Hankel BaoFounder

What Coldreach does

Coldreach helps sales teams find ready-to-buy leads, by monitoring public signals *custom* to your product. For example, it can find who's hiring their first accountant, so an accounting automation product can hit them with a targeted message at the right time. Public data sources (job postings, news articles, 10-k reports, etc.) tell a lot about a company’s priorities and the problems it faces. We train AI sales agents to monitor them and find who needs your help and why. Sales teams know who'd thank them for a cold email/call now, and can sound relevant without hrs of manual research. Typically, targeted outreach yields 2-8x higher booking rate compared to random outreach. **Example intent signals we track**: - Bookkeeping automation product: Monitor who starts to hire human to manually enter invoices - Compliance product: Monitor who recently onboarded a new Compliance Analyst - CRM integrations: Monitor who starts to hire engineers experienced in Salesforce API.

Coldreach's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Coldreach, Winter 2023 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Coldreach

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Find the best leads with custom intent signals

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

We built an AI-powered sales tool that monitors public data tailored to a specific product's sales triggers. For example, if you sell bookkeeping automation software, Coldreach detects when companies start hiring manual bookkeepers. That signal means they're likely to need your product soon. We pull from job postings, news, and regulatory filings, and then train AI agents to spot these custom signals that indicate buying intent. This saves sales teams hours of manual research and leads to 2-8x higher booking rates by making cold outreach relevant and timely.

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

We live in San Francisco, CA, and the company is based here now. After YC, we plan to stay in San Francisco.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco is the ecosystem we're part of and where we can easily find customers and technical talent. We are already embedded here and don't see a reason to relocate.

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 Coldreach YC application?

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