Dalus YC Application

Winter 2025Active

Dalus went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2025 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 2025
Industry: B2BEngineering, Product and Design
Team size: 3
Status: Active
Launched: 2025

Founders

Sebastian VölklFounder
Eliot KhachiFounder

What Dalus does

Dalus is an AI-powered systems engineering software to model/validate complex systems for aerospace/defense/robotics and other mission-critical industries. With Dalus, engineers can seamlessly trace requirements, perform analyses, and update information in real-time. This ensures that every team member stays aligned and informed, reducing inefficiencies and enabling faster iterations. With AI at our core, users can analyze hundreds of pages of existing engineering documentation and requirements to generate or retrieve information about the system model they are building in Dalus. We started working together on Dalus in spring 2024 after Eliot quit his job at Aerojet Rocketdyne (L3Harris) where he worked as a test/systems engineer. He experienced first-hand how silos and poor communication reduced the productivity and efficiencies in the teams he worked at. We love working with companies tackling complex engineering systems, whether they be startups just getting their feet wet or large organizations like Israel Aerospace Industries (Our design partner and biggest aerospace/defense company from Israel) Read why we started Dalus:

Dalus's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Dalus, Winter 2025 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Dalus

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

AI-Powered Hardware System Design Software

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

We build AI-powered systems engineering software for aerospace, defense, and robotics. Dalus helps engineers model and validate complex hardware systems by tracing requirements, running analyses, and syncing updates across teams in real time. Our AI digs through hundreds of pages of engineering documents to generate or retrieve detailed info about the system being designed, speeding up alignment and iteration for mission-critical projects.

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

We live in San Francisco, CA, and plan to keep the company based here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

SF has the technical talent, investor network, and aerospace/defense ecosystem that fit Dalus's needs. It's where we started and where our design partner Israel Aerospace Industries and initial customers are most accessible.

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 Dalus YC application?

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