Mercator YC Application

Summer 2022Inactive

Mercator went through Y Combinator in the Summer 2022 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 2022
Industry: B2B
Team size: 2
Status: Inactive
Launched: 2022

Founders

Dayton ThorpeFounder
Andrew DubersteinFounder

What Mercator does

Mercator is your AI-assisted data analytics platform for writing faster, cheaper, and smarter SQL. Co-founders Andrew and Dayton met on the Instacart data science team. Dayton earned a physics PhD at UC Berkeley before entering DS. Andrew spent six years as a SWE at Uber, where he developed pydeck, a geospatial data visualization library with over 12M downloads. Mercator is backed by Y Combinator, Tribe Capital, Soma Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Amplify Partners, and Rebel Fund.

Mercator's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Mercator, Summer 2022 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Mercator

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

AI-assisted data analytics

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

We are building an AI-assisted data analytics platform that helps analysts write SQL queries faster, cheaper, and with fewer errors. Our product uses AI to generate and optimize SQL, making complex data analysis accessible to teams with varied data expertise. We focus on improving productivity for data teams at companies that rely heavily on SQL.

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

We live in San Francisco and operate remotely as well. After YC, we plan to keep Mercator based in San Francisco.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco is where we both live and where our network and potential customers are concentrated. Remoteness allows flexibility, but the Bay Area is still the best hub for product development and customer engagement.

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 Mercator YC application?

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