Magna YC Application

Winter 2022Acquired

Magna went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2022 batch as a Fintech 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: Winter 2022
Industry: Fintech
Team size: 18
Status: Acquired
Launched: 2022

Founders

Bruno FavieroFounder
Arun KirubarajanFounder

What Magna does

Magna is building a platform to turn DeFi investments into financial primitives. Our first product is Carta for Web3, where companies can manage their cap tables and distribute their token equity to employees, advisors, or investors. We’re also building investor infrastructure for institutions to custody investments with on-chain execution and intelligence. Our ultimate goal is to use locked tokens as composable building blocks to power collateralized lending, liquid secondary markets, and other DeFi applications. Launching a token? Let's chat. Are you receiving tokens from your investments? We can also be helpful. What are our companies saying about the problem? > Having it all bundled together would make life easier. We have a million things to do. If you have an off-the-shelf thing, we’d use it. > This wouldn’t be a nice to have, it’d be a have to have. > Terrible process. We’re manually sending out transactions, going to solscan and manually check that they received our token. Takes hours every week. > Everything we do is potentially very dangerous. We have to check it thoroughly. I’ve spent several hours a day on this since launch. I imagine every month, it’ll take us at least 1-2 days. > Manual process every month for the ops team. They likely burn a week.... every month to pay out 150+ addresses.

Magna's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Magna, Winter 2022 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Magna

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Carta for Web3: token vesting and DeFi management

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

We build a platform that turns DeFi investments into financial primitives. Our first product is a Web3 cap table manager that handles token equity distributions for companies, employees, advisors, and investors. We also provide investor infrastructure to custody DeFi investments, execute on-chain transactions, and offer intelligence. Our goal is to make locked tokens useful for lending, secondary markets, and other DeFi uses.

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

We live in New York, NY, and after YC the company would remain based there.

Explain your decision regarding location.

New York is where we formed the company and built our core team. It connects us directly to many fintech and crypto investors and partners, which is critical for our product and business.

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 Magna YC application?

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