Proven Group YC Application

Winter 2018Active

Proven Group went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2018 batch as a Consumer 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 2018
Industry: Consumer
Team size: 40
Status: Active
Launched: 2017

Founders

Amy YuanFounder
Ming ZhaoFounder

What Proven Group does

Proven is a data powered skincare company that creates personalized skincare products based on more than 47 factors about an individual's skin, genetic background, lifestyle and environment. Our formulations are rooted in the largest beauty database in the world, the proprietary Skin Genome Project, built in-house by Proven's cofounder Amy Yuan, a computational physicist from Stanford. The database has won MIT's AI Technology of the Year award and encompasses more than 20Million consumer datapoints and thousands of scientific articles on skin. Our challenge now is to tell the story of Proven, and share our industry leading personalized skincare products with the world.

Proven Group's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Proven Group, Winter 2018 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Proven Group

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

AI-powered personalized skincare

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

We build personalized skincare products based on a proprietary AI system that analyzes over 47 factors about an individual's skin, genetics, lifestyle, and environment. Our Skin Genome Project database powers formulations tailored to each user's unique needs.

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

We live in San Francisco and operate with a distributed remote team. After YC, we would base the company primarily in San Francisco to stay close to tech and market opportunities.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco has the talent, investors, and consumer markets crucial for scaling a consumer tech company like Proven. Remote work helps us access skilled team members elsewhere but keeping a base here makes sense.

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 Proven Group YC application?

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