Nitrode YC Application

Winter 2025Active

Nitrode went through Y Combinator in the Winter 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: Winter 2025
Industry: B2B
Team size: 4
Status: Active
Launched: 2025

Founders

Ben KimCo-Founder
Sejoon ChangCo-Founder
Brian LaCo-Founder

What Nitrode does

Nitrode builds high-quality game data to train and evaluate LLMs and agents on spatial and temporal reasoning. Today’s models are trained on static text and images, but struggle to understand how the world evolves over time. We create small, fully specified game environments that generate ground-truth data on state, transitions, and hidden dynamics. This enables AI systems to move beyond simple pattern matching, incorporating memory, causality, and multi-step reasoning to create more reliable agents in dynamic environments.

Nitrode's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Nitrode, Winter 2025 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Nitrode

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Data for reasoning agents in dynamic environments

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

We build high-quality, fully specified game environments that generate precise data about state, transitions, and hidden dynamics. This data trains and evaluates large language models and agents on spatial and temporal reasoning. Our product lets AI move beyond static pattern matching so they can handle memory, causality, and multi-step reasoning in dynamic settings.

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

We live and work in San Francisco, and the company will be based there after YC as well.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco is where our team is located and where most potential AI research and ML product partners are based, so it makes sense to build the company 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 Nitrode YC application?

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