Retrofit YC Application

Winter 2025Active

Retrofit went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2025 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 2025
Industry: ConsumerApparel and Cosmetics
Team size: 2
Status: Active
Launched: 2025

Founders

Sandra LifshitsFounder, CEO

What Retrofit does

Retrofit is reimagining the future of secondhand shopping. We are a new vintage marketplace that uses AI agents to curate and personalize in-demand, trending inventory. We analyze social media trends, sales data, and personal style to find the best vintage pieces that fit an individual’s unique taste, size, and budget.

Retrofit's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Retrofit, Winter 2025 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Retrofit

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

A vintage marketplace curated by AI

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

We are building a new kind of vintage marketplace that uses AI agents to find and recommend vintage clothes tailored to each customer's style, size, and budget. Our AI analyzes social media trends, sales data, and personal preferences to surface high-demand pieces that users are likely to want, helping them shop secondhand efficiently without endless searching.

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

We live and are based in New York City, and after YC we'll remain here to stay connected to a large fashion and vintage community and access to sellers and buyers straight from the city.

Explain your decision regarding location.

New York is a vintage hub with a dense fashion scene and many small sellers who don't have online reach. Being local helps us curate better inventory and understand style trends in real time. It also lets us stay close to early users and test our product face-to-face, which is crucial for a marketplace.

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 Retrofit YC application?

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