SafetyKit YC Application

Summer 2023Active

SafetyKit 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: B2B
Team size: 10
Status: Active
Launched: 2023

Founders

David GraunkeFounder
Steven GuichardFounder

What SafetyKit does

SafetyKit's AI agents do the dirty work for big tech and finance companies so humans don't have to. Today companies rely on armies of low-paid outsourced humans to protect their platforms from fraud, harassment, and crime. It’s super important work, but the jobs are difficult and sometimes traumatizing, and it’s impossible to keep up. Our mission is to end this manual toil. We learned this domain first-hand at Stripe and Airbnb, where first we built software for human reviewers, and then built models to replace them. We’re a group of engineers from Stripe, Meta, Netflix, MIT, and Princeton that love language models and unironically love B2B SaaS. We know the economy is going to be rearranged over the next 4 years and we want to be in the driver’s seat. We build vertical AI that works and have some of the world’s largest companies as paying customers. Patreon, Eventbrite, Upwork, Character.ai, Substack, Faire, along with a $10B+ marketplace, a $100B+ payments company, and more rely on SafetyKit in production.

SafetyKit's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

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

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

SafetyKit

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

AI agents for risk, compliance, and safety

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

We build AI agents that automate the tough, often manual work companies have traditionally done with large teams of outsourced humans. Our product helps big tech and finance companies spot fraud, harassment, and other safety or compliance issues so their human teams can focus on higher-level tasks. We started by building tools for reviewers at Stripe and Airbnb and moved to AI models that replace much of that work.

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

We live in San Francisco, and SafetyKit is based here.

Explain your decision regarding location.

SF is the tech and AI hub. Being here lets us hire top AI engineers and stay close to leading customers in fintech and trust & safety.

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 SafetyKit YC application?

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