Cortex AI YC Application
Cortex AI went through Y Combinator in the Fall 2025 batch as a Industrials 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
- Fall 2025
- Industry
- IndustrialsManufacturing and Robotics
- Team size
- 3
- Status
- Active
- Launched
- 2025
Founders
Lucas NgooFounder
What Cortex AI does
Cortex AI builds the world’s most diverse and large-scale real-world workplace robot & egocentric dataset - where the physical world becomes the next training and evaluation set for embodied AI. We power frontier labs developing robotics foundation models and general-purpose robots by providing the data they need: 1️⃣ Egocentric Data - real-workplace human video with hand/body pose, depth, and subtask labels. 2️⃣ Robot Data - trajectories collected from manipulators and humanoids in real industry settings. 3️⃣ Human-in-the-Loop Rollouts & Evals - real-world deployments with remote operators who recover robots when they fail, capturing data that feeds back into training and continuously improves models. Additionally, through the Cortex Marketplace, workplaces get paid to host data-collection and evaluation sessions, while labs access the in-the-wild data that truly matters. This draws on Lucas’s previous experience as co-founder of Carousell, a C2C marketplace that scaled to a $1B+ valuation.
Cortex AI's YC application, reconstructed
Y Combinator application
Cortex AI, Fall 2025 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.
- Founders2
- Company7
- Progress7
- Idea4
- Equity3
- Curious2
- Batch Preference1
Company
Cortex AI
Large-scale real-world robot & human data for embodied AI
We build the largest dataset of real-world workplace robot and egocentric human data. This includes video with hand/body pose, depth, and subtask labels, plus robot trajectories from industrial manipulators and humanoids. We also run human-in-the-loop deployments where remote operators fix robot failures, which creates new data that feeds back into training and evaluation. Labs use our data to train and evaluate robotics foundation models and robots that can operate in real industrial environments.
We live in San Francisco, CA, and plan to keep the company based here after YC.
San Francisco is where we are found and live. It's also a hub for robotics and AI research labs, making it the best place to connect with customers and recruit talent.
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this the real Cortex AI YC application?
No. Y Combinator keeps submitted applications private. This is a reconstruction: the real YC form questions, answered from Cortex AI's public data (launch notes, founder backgrounds, product description). It shows how a company like Cortex AI would present itself to YC, not the text they submitted.
What YC batch was Cortex AI in?
Cortex AI was part of the Y Combinator Fall 2025 batch.
Who founded Cortex AI?
Cortex AI was founded by Lucas Ngoo.
What does Cortex AI do?
Large-scale real-world robot & human data for embodied AI
How do I read the full reconstructed application?
Create a free Round Funded account. The full 26-answer version of Cortex AI's application, and every other YC batch, is in YC Insights.
