Kinect YC Application

Spring 2026Active

Kinect went through Y Combinator in the Spring 2026 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: Spring 2026
Industry: B2B
Team size: 2
Status: Active
Launched: 2026

Founders

Kratik AgrawalFounder
Varun KandulaFounder

What Kinect does

Kinect builds AI agents that know your brand, your catalog, and your customers' taste. On your site, they sell every visitor - running the conversation, adapting product pages in real time to each customer segment, picking the right recommendation for the question being asked. The agent picks up on what each shopper actually wants from how they ask, what they hesitate on, what they compare, and what objection makes them bounce. The storefront stops being a static grid and starts being a salesperson. We take all of a brand's data and make a structured catalog, brand voice, fit notes, return reasons, segment-level nuance - all so the Kinect agents truly can speak about a brand. When an agent describes the brand, the version it describes is the one you'd want them to, not whatever it guessed from a public catalog scrape. Every interaction becomes signal the brand owns. The model gets sharper, the storefront gets better at selling, every session. Kinect continues to optimize on intent data, user journey data, agentic search data, and more. Over time gaps are filled and conversion for agentic commerce continues to improve. We're building for human shoppers today and the AI agents that shop and discovery for them. Either way, the entire website needs to get a lot smarter and personalized. Two surfaces. One brand layer. Built for scaling DTC ecommerce brands.

Kinect's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Kinect, Spring 2026 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Kinect

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Brand Layer for AI Native Commerce

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

We build AI agents that understand a brand's unique catalog, voice, and customer preferences to engage visitors on DTC ecommerce sites. The agent runs conversations, adapts product pages in real time, and tailors recommendations. Instead of a static storefront, we create a dynamic salesperson that learns from each interaction - hesitations, comparisons, objections - and improves how it sells over time.

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

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

Explain your decision regarding location.

We are in San Francisco because it's where we live and where we can find early customers and talent in ecommerce AI. Staying here puts us close to our initial user base and keeps us connected to key industry hubs.

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 Kinect YC application?

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