Mezmo YC Application

Winter 2015Active

Mezmo went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2015 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: Winter 2015
Industry: B2BInfrastructure
Team size: 172
Status: Active
Launched: 2014

Founders

Lee LiuFounder
Chris NguyenFounder

What Mezmo does

Mezmo, formerly LogDNA, is an observability platform to manage and take action on your data. It ingests, processes, and routes log data to fuel enterprise-level application development and delivery, security, and compliance use cases. Mezmo was brought to life by three-time co-founders Chris Nguyen and Lee Liu and included in the Winter 2015 batch of Y Combinator. In 2018 the company partnered with tech giant, IBM, to become the sole logging provider for IBM Cloud. Mezmo is on a mission to empower people who build solutions that shape the world. We’re doing this by delivering a platform that enables enterprises to get more value from their observability data in real time, regardless of source, destination, use case, or scale. We’re not the only ones working on this problem but we have a few things the others don’t. We’re cloud-native and know how to make the most of modern technology like Kubernetes. We have scaled a solution from zero to petabyte scale in a short amount of time, while supporting thousands of active users across multiple environments. We are hungry for change and are surrounded by enterprises telling us they’re hungry, too. We have a kick-ass group of people who are thinking about the problem analytically and are excited to change the observability world for the better. Mezmo has helped some of the world’s most innovative companies transform how they manage their systems and applications. Still, we know that we can help them get more value from their observability data by providing more flexibility and control over how they use it. This will enable teams to spend less time switching between data silos so they can focus on shipping better, more resilient, and secure products. We have momentum on our side. Last year we saw triple digit revenue growth and added 800 new customers to our roster. Recent accolades include being named to YC’s Top Companies, CRN’s 10 Hottest DevOps Startups, and EMA’s Top 3 Observability Platforms.

Mezmo's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Mezmo, Winter 2015 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Mezmo

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Observability platform to control all of your log data

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

We build an observability platform that ingests, processes, and routes log data. It helps engineering and security teams manage data from multiple sources at scale, enabling them to build and monitor applications more efficiently. It handles complex infrastructure like Kubernetes and supports large enterprises' needs.

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

We live in San Jose and Mountain View, CA, with a distributed remote team. After YC, the company would continue to be based in this area with remote flexibility.

Explain your decision regarding location.

We chose Silicon Valley because it's where our team, customers, and partners are concentrated. The area's access to talent and technology is critical for a deeply technical infrastructure product like ours.

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 Mezmo YC application?

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