rift YC Application

Winter 2023Active

rift went through Y Combinator in the Winter 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: Winter 2023
Industry: B2BSales
Team size: 2
Status: Active
Launched: 2023

Founders

Fil TwarowskiFounder
Edvard ErikssonFounder

What rift does

rift is B2B lead routing made simple. Inbound workflows leak revenue at every step. Routing is manual. Calendar links are generic. No-shows go unrecovered. The handoff between form fill and booked meeting is where pipeline quietly dies. rift fixes that. One system for the full inbound lifecycle: > Capture. Custom web forms that collect and qualify leads in real time. > Route. Instant validation, enrichment, and assignment to the right rep. > Schedule. Top prospects get the best calendar slots, matched to real availability. > Recover. No-shows and ghosted leads are automatically re-engaged. rift is built by growth engineers who ran inbound at high-velocity B2B companies and got tired of watching pipeline fall through the cracks. rift is the system we wished existed - opinionated, fast, and wired into the tools sales teams already use: HubSpot, Apollo, Google Calendar, Gmail, Slack, Zoom, Stripe, and more. Backed by Y Combinator (W23) and Sequoia Capital. never lose an inbound lead → rift.com

rift's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

rift, Winter 2023 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

rift

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

B2B lead routing made simple

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

We built rift to fix how inbound B2B leads leak revenue at every step. It captures leads via custom web forms, validates and enriches them instantly, routes each to the right sales rep, schedules meetings with real calendar availability, and automatically re-engages no-shows. It's the system we wished existed because routing leads manually and handling no-shows wastes pipeline for growth teams.

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

We live in San Francisco, CA and rift would be based here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco is where we built rift and it's central to the B2B SaaS and sales tooling ecosystem we integrate with. Staying here keeps product development and customer conversations close.

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 rift YC application?

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