Haystack YC Application

Summer 2024Active

Haystack went through Y Combinator in the Summer 2024 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 2024
Industry: B2BEngineering, Product and Design
Team size: 2
Status: Active
Launched: 2024

Founders

Jake YatvitskiyFounder
Akshay SubramaniamFounder

What Haystack does

Haystack helps engineering teams manage the growing volume of AI-generated pull requests. Coding agents make it much easier to produce code, but they also create a new problem: teams now have more changes to review, many of them larger, more frequent, and harder to trust at a glance. Haystack sits on top of GitHub and acts as the control layer for AI-generated code changes. For every pull request, it looks at the codebase, the diff, the agent trace, the author’s intent, and any verification evidence like tests, logs, commands, or screenshots. Then Haystack decides what should happen next: whether the change can move forward, needs fixes, or should be reviewed by a human. Teams use Haystack to keep code moving without turning review into rubber-stamping. It helps them merge more code, focus human attention on the changes that actually need judgment, and maintain quality as AI-generated work becomes a bigger part of development.

Haystack's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Haystack, Summer 2024 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Haystack

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Agent-native control layer for code changes

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

We built Haystack to help engineering teams manage AI-generated pull requests. It integrates with GitHub to analyze each PR in context - the codebase, the diff, the agent's reasoning, and any verification artifacts. It then recommends whether the change can be merged, needs fixes, or requires human review. This keeps code flowing without teams losing trust in AI changes or wasting time rubber-stamping.

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

We currently live in New York, NY, and plan to keep the company based there after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

We chose New York because that's where we live and build. The engineering and product functions flow best for us here, and we want to stay close to the users and ecosystem we understand.

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 Haystack YC application?

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