Maximal YC Application

Summer 2025Active

Maximal 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: B2BSupply Chain and Logistics
Team size: 3
Status: Active
Launched: 2025

Founders

Leeds RisingFounder
Derek YeFounder

What Maximal does

Today, commercial trucking fleets make planning and dispatch decisions on gut feel and legacy tooling. Their margin is dictated by their planner's cognitive capacity. Maximal gives carriers an AI planning system that sources loads, creates plans, and automatically adjusts as changes happen. Maximal lets carriers run at the margin of our simulation engine + agents. Leeds (CEO) studied operations research + computer science at Cornell and Columbia and his family runs a 3PL. He worked on the algorithm's that power Amazon’s robotics in distribution centers and he was the 1st PM at Golden (acquired) and 7th PM at Alchemy (a16z, Coatue). Derek (CTO) studied computer science at USC, was founding engineer at Kits AI (acquired), and was the youngest tech lead in his department at Amazon.

Maximal's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

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

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Maximal

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Maximal is a planning agent for commercial truck fleets

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

We built an AI system that plans and dispatches loads for commercial trucking fleets. It sources freight, creates optimized plans, and adjusts automatically when things change. Our goal is to replace gut decisions and legacy tools with a system that runs fleets close to their operational limits using simulation and agent-based models.

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

We live in San Francisco, CA, and Maximal will be based here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

We live in San Francisco because it has the talent and startup ecosystem we need. Our team is already here, so it makes sense to stay and grow from here.

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 Maximal YC application?

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