MindsDB YC Application

Winter 2020Active

MindsDB went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2020 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 2020
Industry: B2BInfrastructure
Team size: 41
Status: Active
Launched: 2020

Founders

Adam CarriganFounder
Jorge TorresFounder

What MindsDB does

MindsDB is a fast-growing AI startup headquartered in San Francisco, California. As a leading innovator bringing AI and Data together, our passion is empowering companies to easily build AI capabilities that can Think, Understand and Orchestrate: enabling teams to move from prototyping & experimentation to production in a fast & scalable way. MindsDB was founded in 2017 by Adam Carrigan and Jorge Torres, inspired by Ian M. Banks's Culture series, in which super AI systems called Minds collaborate with other forms of life to accomplish incredible goals. Starting as an Open-Source project, MindsDB has grown to be one of the most widely used AI-Data platforms in the world, with a growing community and more than 700 contributor developers from every corner of the globe. We are backed with over $55M in funding from Mayfield, Benchmark, YCombinator, and nVidia. MindsDB is also recognized by Forbes as one of America's most promising AI companies (2021) and by Gartner as a Cool Vendor for Data and AI (2022).

MindsDB's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

MindsDB, Winter 2020 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

MindsDB

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Connect, unify, respond to any data with AI

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

We build an AI platform that integrates with databases, enabling users to train and deploy machine learning models directly where their data lives. MindsDB lets data teams move models from prototyping to production quickly without specialized AI infrastructure. It connects to any data source and provides a way to run human-level data queries and responses inside existing database tools.

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

We live in San Francisco, CA. MindsDB is based here and would remain in San Francisco after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco gives us access to a strong engineering talent pool and proximity to customers in AI and enterprise software. Our team and infrastructure have grown here, making it the best place to build and scale MindsDB.

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 MindsDB YC application?

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