Cortex YC Application

Winter 2020Active

Cortex went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2020 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 2020
Industry: B2BInfrastructure
Team size: 100
Status: Active
Launched: 2020

Founders

Ganesh DattaFounder
Anish DharFounder
Nikhil UnniFounder

What Cortex does

Cortex is an internal developer portal built to accelerate the path to engineering excellence. Companies like Xero, Canva, and TripAdvisor use Cortex to catalog, score, and assign action to improve service quality and velocity, so devs can get back to work that drives the business forward.

Cortex's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Cortex, Winter 2020 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Cortex

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Internal developer portal reducing developer tax

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

Cortex is an internal developer portal that centralizes service cataloging, scoring, and actionable insights to help engineering teams improve service quality and speed. It automates tracking and surfaces technical debt so developers spend less time hunting information and more time delivering features.

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

We live in San Francisco and remote; Cortex is based out of San Francisco with a distributed team.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco is a hub for engineering talent and potential customers in B2B SaaS, which helps us build connections and recruit engineers. Remote work enables us to hire broadly and adapt to current trends.

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 Cortex YC application?

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