PgDog YC Application

Spring 2025Active

PgDog went through Y Combinator in the Spring 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: Spring 2025
Industry: B2BInfrastructure
Team size: 2
Status: Active
Launched: 2025

Founders

Lev KokotovFounder

What PgDog does

PgDog is an application for sharding PostgreSQL. It understands SQL and can distribute queries automatically between databases. It's built for managed databases, like AWS RDS, and doesn't require any changes to application code or schema. In addition to sharding, PgDog is a load balancer and pooler, so it can act as a replacement for PgBouncer, RDS Proxy, and other Postgres scaling products. It brings the simplicity and performance of HTTP load balancing to the database. Built from the experience of sharding Postgres at Instacart during peak growth in 2020, PgDog is the answer to the old question: does Postgres scale? It does now.

PgDog's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

PgDog, Spring 2025 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

PgDog

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Scaling engine for PostgreSQL

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

We built PgDog to shard PostgreSQL databases automatically without changing app code or schemas. It parses SQL and distributes queries across multiple Postgres instances, designed for managed environments like AWS RDS. PgDog also acts as a load balancer and pooler, replacing tools like PgBouncer and RDS Proxy to bring simpler, HTTP-style load balancing to Postgres.

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

Lev lives in San Francisco, and the company remains based there with a remote team member.

Explain your decision regarding location.

We keep our base in San Francisco because that's where Lev is and where we have access to infrastructure and potential users in the B2B and cloud space. We operate mostly remotely but benefit from the tech ecosystem 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 PgDog YC application?

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