Magnetic YC Application

Summer 2025Active

Magnetic 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: B2BProductivity
Team size: 10
Status: Active
Launched: 2025

Founders

Thomas ShelleyFounder
Patrick FayFounder

What Magnetic does

Magnetic scans client documents - from handwritten charity notes to excel spreadsheet Schedule Cs to multi-state K-1s - and enters them into tax software automatically, saving hours of tedious data entry. The accounting profession is facing a massive talent shortage, as graduates choose different professions and the old guard begins to retire. As a result, CPA and tax preparation firms are awash in clientele, but unable to keep up. At many firms, phones go unanswered, clients are "fired", and websites are taken down, as the existing workforce tries to handle the grueling 80 hour+ weeks necessary to push through tax season to the April 15th deadline. We built this because a former colleague who owns her own tax firm asked us to automate her workload, and we quickly realized the massive opportunity. Thomas brings deep domain expertise as the former Head of Product at Keeper (YC W19), where he built tax engine automation systems and an OCR form scanning system that outperformed everything else on the market. At Keeper, he leveraged early access to OpenAI's LLMs (well before ChatGPT) to build systems that automated the entire tax filing process, allowing a tiny team of CPAs to process thousands of returns with near zero busy work. Patrick was the first engineer at FunCraft, shipping multiple mobile games with 1M+ downloads and building scalable shared codebases. We've worked together since 2017, including co-leading multiple teams at Zynga as PM & Tech Lead respectively. The opportunity is massive - there are 80M US personal tax returns filed via professionals annually, in a $2B outsourcing market where individual CPA firms currently pay $100k-$1M per year for inferior services. We're positioned to capture significant market share by offering better accuracy & document coverage, instant processing, and superior user experience. We've built this kind of software before, we've worked together for years (and even lived together), we've built products to $10M ARR before, and we have the grit to outwork anyone in this space.

Magnetic's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

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

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Magnetic

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

AI Tax Preparer for CPA firms

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

We built software that scans all kinds of tax client documents - from handwritten charity notes to complex multi-state K-1s - and automatically enters the data into tax software. This saves CPA firms hours of manual data entry during tax season.

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

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

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco is where the team already lives and where we have relevant industry contacts. It's also a hub for AI and productivity startups.

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 Magnetic YC application?

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