refine YC Application

Summer 2023Active

refine 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: B2BEngineering, Product and Design
Team size: 10
Status: Active
Launched: 2023

Founders

Civan OzseyhanFounder
Omer AplakFounder
Eren ErkalkanFounder

What refine does

refine is an open-source, headless React framework for rapidly building enterprise web applications. It eliminates many repetitive tasks like ➡️ CRUD operations ➡️ State management ➡️ Routing ➡️ Authentication ➡️ Access Control ➡️ i18n and saves days of development time. So far, thousands of great projects have been built by 15,000+ monthly active refine developers. Use cases are ranging from admin panels, dashboards, and internal tools to B2B solutions and complex SaaS interfaces. refine is backed by a strong community featuring 16K GitHub stars ⭐️, 180+ contributors and 2,500 Discord members. Thanks to it's unique "Headless UI" approach, refine works with any custom design. It has also ready-made integrations with 4 most popular UI frameworks: Ant Design, Material UI, Chakra UI and Mantine. refine is totally backend agnostic and it can connect to 15+ backend services out-of-the-box, incl. custom REST & GraphQL API's. With refine, developers always have 100% control over their projects as they build, style and deploy the way they like.

refine's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

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

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

refine

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Open-source Retool for enterprise

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

We built refine, a headless React framework that helps developers rapidly build enterprise web apps. It cuts out repetitive tasks like CRUD, state management, routing, authentication, access control, and i18n, saving days or weeks of development time. Unlike traditional low-code tools, refine gives developers full control over styling and architecture and works backend-agnostic, supporting REST, GraphQL, and many services out of the box.

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

We're based in San Francisco, CA, USA, but have a remote team distributed beyond the city. After YC, we plan to keep our remote-first approach with headquarters remaining in San Francisco.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco remains our HQ because of access to talent, partners, and investor networks, but we embrace a remote culture given the nature of developer tools and our distributed team.

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 refine YC application?

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