Smarking YC Application

Winter 2015Acquired

Smarking went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2015 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 2015
Industry: B2BAnalytics
Team size: 17
Status: Acquired
Launched: 2014

Founders

Wen SangFounder/CEO
Maokai LinFounder/CTO

What Smarking does

Smarking is a group of hyper-driven MIT PhDs, data scientists, engineers, transportation experts, and battle-tested business professionals working to solve the notorious parking problem via a unique enterprise approach. Smarking aims to enable highly efficient urban mobility by digitizing parking spaces and distributing parking inventory dynamically, in order to get the world ready for the connected, shared, and autonomous future. Backed by top VCs like Y Combinator and Khosla Ventures, Smarking has brought its solution to over 2,500 parking locations across North America. For the first time, cities, parking asset owners, and parking operators can make data-driven decisions easily. Smarking also launched the industry’s first fully automatic dynamic pricing engine, producing 40%-400% revenue uplifts for online sales at at parking locations Chicago, NYC, Boston, and many other cities.

Smarking's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Smarking, Winter 2015 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Smarking

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Digitize $655B parking industry

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

We built an enterprise SaaS platform that brings data-driven decision-making to parking operators, asset owners, and cities. Our system digitizes parking inventory, uses dynamic pricing algorithms, and delivers analytics to optimize urban parking revenue and availability.

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

We live in San Francisco, CA, and the company is based here with some remote team members.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco is the core hub for tech talent and investors. Being here lets us access strong engineering resources and be close to early customers and partners in urban environments.

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 Smarking YC application?

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