Lilac Labs YC Application

Summer 2024Active

Lilac Labs 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: B2B
Team size: 4
Status: Active
Launched: 2024

Founders

Tony KamCo-Founder / CEO
Shelden ShiCo-Founder / CTO

What Lilac Labs does

At Lilac, we automate the person taking order at the drive thru with a voice AI. We're building this for Quick Service Restaurants (QSRs) dealing with an historical labor shortage and rising wages. Previous attempts at drive-thru voice ordering are costly to implement and have failed to deliver the accuracy and latency needed. It's now possible to build a voice interface that passes the threshold for a great customer experience. In the United States, there are 200,000 Drive-Thrus handling 6 Billion visits a year. At 3 minutes per order, that's 34,000 human years spent on taking orders annually. Per location, on average we can deliver around $100,000 of value in terms of labor savings, upsell revenue lift, and training costs.

Lilac Labs's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

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

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Lilac Labs

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Voice AI that automates drive-thru ordering

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

We're building a voice AI that takes drive-thru orders at Quick Service Restaurants. It replaces the human taking orders, improving order speed and accuracy despite the labor shortage and rising wages in QSRs. Our system handles noisy environments and complex menus to meet customer expectations where previous solutions failed.

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

We live in San Francisco, CA, and the company is based here now and will remain here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco is where we and our team currently live. It gives us access to tech talent and proximity to early customers and partners in the restaurant technology scene.

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 Lilac Labs YC application?

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