OnDeck AI YC Application

Summer 2025Active

OnDeck AI 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: B2BAnalytics
Team size: 5
Status: Active
Launched: 2025

Founders

Alexander DungateFounder
Sepand DyanatkarFounder

What OnDeck AI does

OnDeck is the infrastructure layer that makes Vision Language Models accessible and scalable for enterprise. We let organizations instantly find any object, behavior or event, in any footage, without needing to train a model or collect any training data. The Pain: Creating vision models usually takes months: collecting training data, training, then deployment. Worse yet: + it’s often impossible to get enough data for a specific task, and + even the best cv models struggle to generalize across diverse camera setups, workflows and environments. To overcome these blockers, we bet early on the power of VLMs and built a vision engine that can generalize across any task and doesn’t need any training data. We published a NeurIPS workshop paper showing our new methods with VLMs beat traditional CV even at niche tasks. Our current customers include: - National Defense Organizations - Robotics Research - Security cameras - Behaviour analysis for port monitoring - Off-shore oil & gas monitoring

OnDeck AI's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

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

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

OnDeck AI

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Analyze any footage, no training needed

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

We built an AI platform that lets enterprises search any video footage instantly for objects, behaviors, or events. Unlike traditional computer vision, OnDeck AI doesn't require training models or gathering training data. We use Vision Language Models to handle any footage directly, making video analysis faster and scalable across different camera setups and environments.

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

We live in Vancouver, BC, Canada, and plan to keep the company based there after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

Our team is all local to Vancouver where we built the company. We have the talent and infrastructure here to grow efficiently without needing to relocate.

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 OnDeck AI YC application?

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