Rhizome AI YC Application

Winter 2026Active

Rhizome AI went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2026 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: Winter 2026
Industry: B2B
Team size: 1
Status: Active
Launched: 2026

Founders

Chetan MishraFounder

What Rhizome AI does

It takes 500,000 days of office work to bring a drug to market. We want to make it 5. To get there, we need agents doing most of the work. Today, our research agent is the best way to know what the FDA thinks. Users ask a question and get an answer backed by up to 1,000 documents, where each statement has a citation. It’s the best because we have the best retrieval engine. We’ve tuned it on our life science-specific dataset, and we find what others miss. As more teams use Rhizome, we gain more data on what regulatory professionals actually need, which makes retrieval even better. This flywheel is how we become the retrieval engine that powers all human and agent work in life sciences. Chetan started his career as a research engineer, but quickly realized he enjoyed building more than research. He joined EvolutionaryScale as their sole founding product engineer, launching their developer-scientist platform and scaling to tens of thousands of users and billions of API calls. He was also #16 at Instabase helping banks with document processing, closing $7m as the technical closer. Agents can do magical things today, but most in life sciences only use them to edit emails. Agents are missing the context they need to 100x the number of drugs we can bring to market. Rhizome AI is focused on that critical problem.

Rhizome AI's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Rhizome AI, Winter 2026 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Rhizome AI

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Agent Platform for Life Sciences

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

We built a research agent that helps regulatory professionals understand FDA guidance by answering their questions with citations from up to 1,000 relevant documents. It's powered by a retrieval engine tuned specifically on life science datasets that finds regulatory information others miss. Our product aims to automate much of the work involved in navigating drug approval processes.

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

I live in New York City and the company is based there and remotely distributed.

Explain your decision regarding location.

New York is a major life sciences hub, and remote lets us access talent and customers globally. This fits our need to stay close to regulatory experts and life sciences teams while keeping flexibility.

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 Rhizome AI YC application?

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