Rankai YC Application

Summer 2023Active

Rankai went through Y Combinator in the Summer 2023 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 2023
Industry: B2BMarketing
Team size: 4
Status: Active
Launched: 2024

Founders

Dyllan LiuCo-Founder and CEO
Hugo (Kanghong) ZhanCo-Founder, CTO

What Rankai does

SEO & GEO is confusing and massively overpriced. RankAI will handle everything autonomously to drive you millions of visitors from Google and AI search like ChatGPT. RankAI first identifies search queries your customers already search for, then it builds search-optimized pages to capture millions of these queries. Finally, like a real agency, RankAI will track its results, rethink its strategy, and rewrite pages again and again to improve performance. RankAI does not stop until traffic swarms in.

Rankai's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Rankai, Summer 2023 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Rankai

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

AI-Native Agency for Organic Growth

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

We built RankAI to fully automate SEO and GEO marketing for B2B companies. It identifies the exact search queries your potential customers already type, then creates and optimizes pages targeted to those queries. Beyond building pages, it tracks performance and iterates automatically to keep improving traffic until millions of visitors arrive. Our product runs like an agency powered by AI, removing confusion and high costs from organic growth.

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

We live and work in San Francisco, CA, and plan to keep the company based here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco has the tech talent and network we need. It helps us recruit engineers and connect with early users in marketing and SaaS companies.

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 Rankai YC application?

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