Dagger YC Application
Dagger went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2019 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 2019
- Industry
- B2BEngineering, Product and Design
- Team size
- 22
- Status
- Active
- Launched
- 2022
Founders
Solomon HykesFounder
What Dagger does
Dagger is a programmable CI/CD engine that runs your pipelines in containers. Develop your pipelines as code, in the same programming language as your application. Choose your SDK and start coding! Dagger executes your pipelines entirely as standard OCI containers. This has several benefits: - Instant local testing - Portability: the same pipeline can run on your local machine, a CI runner, a dedicated server, or any container hosting service. - Superior caching: every operation is cached by default, and caching works the same everywhere - Compatibility with the Docker ecosystem: if it runs in a container, you can add it to your pipeline. - Cross-language instrumentation: teams can use each other's tools without learning each other's language.
Dagger's YC application, reconstructed
Y Combinator application
Dagger, Winter 2019 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.
- Founders2
- Company7
- Progress7
- Idea4
- Equity3
- Curious2
- Batch Preference1
Company
Dagger
Develop your CI/CD pipelines as code and run them anywhere
We built a programmable CI/CD engine that lets developers write pipelines as code in the same language as their app. Our product runs pipelines entirely as containerized steps, enabling instant local testing, portability across environments, reliable caching, and easy integration with existing Docker-based tools.
Our team is distributed across San Francisco, London, Seattle, Portland, Boulder, Lyon, Buenos Aires, Bogotá, Vancouver, Montevideo, and Ponta Delgada. The company remains remote-first and distributed post-YC.
We built a global distributed team to tap into developer talent worldwide and because pipeline workflows are universal. Our team's spread enables us to support developer needs at any scale or location without centralizing operations.
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 Dagger YC application?
No. Y Combinator keeps submitted applications private. This is a reconstruction: the real YC form questions, answered from Dagger's public data (launch notes, founder backgrounds, product description). It shows how a company like Dagger would present itself to YC, not the text they submitted.
What YC batch was Dagger in?
Dagger was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2019 batch.
Who founded Dagger?
Dagger was founded by Solomon Hykes.
What does Dagger do?
Develop your CI/CD pipelines as code and run them anywhere
How do I read the full reconstructed application?
Create a free Round Funded account. The full 26-answer version of Dagger's application, and every other YC batch, is in YC Insights.
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