Terark YC Application

Winter 2017Acquired

Terark went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2017 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 2017
Industry: B2BInfrastructure
Team size: 2
Status: Acquired
Launched: 2016

Founders

Sean FuFounder/CEO
Peng LeiFounder

What Terark does

Terark built a new storage engine for Database and Data Systems. Our technology enables direct search on highly compressed data, with 200X faster read performance and more than 10X storage savings (better than Google's LevelDB, Facebook's RocksDB), getting larger scalability with lower cost for big data applications. Alibaba is our paying customer, and we are a YCombinator company.

Terark's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Terark, Winter 2017 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Terark

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Fastest storage engine with best compression

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

We built a storage engine that enables direct search on highly compressed data. Compared to LevelDB and RocksDB, our engine reads data 200X faster and compresses it over 10X more. This lets big data applications scale larger at lower cost. Alibaba is already a paying customer using our technology in production.

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

We live and work in Beijing, Beijing, China; the company is based there.

Explain your decision regarding location.

We are based in Beijing where our founding team lives and where we have network access to early customers like Alibaba. Staying local lets us iterate quickly and build strong relationships directly with big data users in China.

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 Terark YC application?

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