Halluminate YC Application

Summer 2025Active

Halluminate went through Y Combinator in the Summer 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: Summer 2025
Industry: B2B
Team size: 5
Status: Active
Launched: 2025

Founders

Jerry WuFounder
Wyatt MarshallFounder

What Halluminate does

We help foundation model labs and enterprises train computer use AI with data and sandboxes. A knowledge worker spends 90% of their day on a computer. A productive AI agent must similarly learn how to use our computers, browsers, and software to deliver real world value. Today, browser and computer use AI is inaccurate, slow, and expensive. Model labs and enterprises who want to improve these agents are bottlenecked by two resources: 1) High quality datasets for benchmarking and evaluations 2) Realistic sandbox environments for safe and accurate testing/training (ex. a simulated version of Salesforce) Halluminate offers a suite of products and services to address both these issues. Our evaluation service combines proprietary datasets with high quality annotations to help our customers identify and prioritize the biggest failure modes of their computer- and browser- use AI. Our platform provides a catalog of fully managed sandboxes, empowering our customers to safely and accurately test/train at scale, resulting in improved performance. Our customers see - Improved browser- and computer-use agent performance - New and emergent frontier agent capabilities - Data driven prioritization leading to exponentially faster development speed - Increased revenue/sales via marketing from public benchmarks Our paying customers already include leading computer use model labs and the two largest browser agent companies in the space. Wyatt and Jerry are friends that met their first week of school studying CS at Cornell University. They’ve been working and studying together for 7+ years.

Halluminate's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Halluminate, Summer 2025 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Halluminate

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Data and RL environments to automate knowledge work

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

We build datasets and realistic sandbox environments that foundation model labs and enterprises use to train and evaluate AI agents that operate software and browsers. Our product includes a benchmark dataset with high-quality annotations and a platform hosting fully managed sandboxes that simulate real applications like Salesforce. This helps our customers accelerate development and improve agent performance in computer and browser use.

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

We live and are based in San Francisco, CA, and will continue to be based here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco is where most of our customers and the AI model labs we work with are, plus it's where we live and have built our team. Staying here keeps us close to the ecosystem we serve and simplifies collaboration.

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 Halluminate YC application?

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