Panels YC Application

Summer 2025Active

Panels 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: B2BEngineering, Product and Design
Team size: 2
Status: Active
Launched: 2025

Founders

Aaron WenkFounder
Jason LeFounder

What Panels does

Panels is an audio data platform that delivers high-quality speech datasets from vetted, diverse contributors to power training and evaluation of foundational voice models.

Panels's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

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

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Panels

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Audio Data for AI Labs

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

We built Panels to provide AI labs with high-quality, diverse speech datasets through a platform that vets contributors and manages audio labeling. Our product handles contributor recruitment, data collection, and quality validation so AI teams can train and evaluate voice models without wasting resources on sourcing or cleaning audio data.

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

We live in San Francisco, CA, and Panels will remain based here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco has the AI and data science talent and startup ecosystem we need to connect with customers and partners. It's where we live and built the product, so it's natural to stay 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 Panels YC application?

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