Data Mechanics YC Application

Summer 2019Acquired

Data Mechanics went through Y Combinator in the Summer 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: Summer 2019
Industry: B2BInfrastructure
Team size: 25
Status: Acquired
Launched: 2019

Founders

Jean Yves StephanFounder
Julien DumazertFounder

What Data Mechanics does

Data Mechanics was acquired by NetApp in 2021 and integrated in the Spot.io product portfolio. Our managed Spark-on-Kubernetes platform is live and running under the name Ocean for Apache Spark:

Data Mechanics's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Data Mechanics, Summer 2019 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Data Mechanics

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Spark-on-Kubernetes Data Engineering Platform

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

We are building a managed platform to run Apache Spark workloads natively on Kubernetes. Our product simplifies data engineering by handling Spark cluster lifecycle, resource optimization, and performance scaling automatically. This removes the operational burden for data teams who want to run Spark jobs on cloud-native infrastructure.

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

We live in Paris, Île-de-France, France, and the company is based here. After YC, we would remain based in Paris but operate globally through a SaaS platform.

Explain your decision regarding location.

We chose Paris as home because that's where Julien and Jean Yves are based and where we found initial customers. The location hasn't impeded our ability to build and launch a global SaaS for data engineering infrastructure.

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 Data Mechanics YC application?

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