Pit.AI YC Application

Winter 2017Inactive

Pit.AI went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2017 batch as a Fintech 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 2017
Industry: FintechAsset Management
Team size: 2
Status: Inactive
Launched: 2016

Founders

Yves-Laurent Kom SamoFounder

What Pit.AI does

Pit.AI Technologies aims at solving intelligence for investment management. We combine bleeding-edge AI research with powerful computing to automatically mine profitable trading strategies in financial markets. Our proprietary pipeline departs from the standard portfolio optimization paradigm in that it avoids making unrealistic assumptions on how markets behave, and it applies the expressiveness of our AI techniques on large scale data to automatically detect and exploit new sources of market inefficiencies, rather than testing or verifying human-generated trading ideas, intuitions, or forecasting models. We believe that the investment management industry is at the dawn of a new AI-led era where trading idea generation will be automated and cost-effective, management fees will be a thing of the past, and fund managers will no longer be paid for merely showing up.

Pit.AI's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Pit.AI, Winter 2017 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Pit.AI

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Solving intelligence for investment management.

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

We build an AI-driven system that mines profitable trading strategies automatically from financial markets data. Unlike standard portfolio optimizers, our product avoids unrealistic market assumptions and detects new inefficiencies without relying on human trading ideas or forecasts.

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

We live in San Francisco, CA, and the company would remain based there after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco is home to a dense fintech and AI community with access to talent and capital, which is crucial for what we're building.

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 Pit.AI YC application?

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