Tinfoil YC Application

Spring 2025Active

Tinfoil went through Y Combinator in the Spring 2025 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: Spring 2025
Industry: B2BSecurity
Team size: 5
Status: Active
Launched: 2025

Founders

Tanya VermaFounder
Jules DreanFounder
Sacha Servan-SchreiberFounder

What Tinfoil does

Tinfoil makes it easy to make your AI workloads secure and provably private. You get the privacy of on-prem deployments, while running on the cloud. It's like end-to-end encrypted messaging but for your AI applications. We’ve built a full-stack platform on top of the latest NVIDIA GPUs offering confidential computing capabilities, meaning that you don’t have to trade off performance for privacy. We integrate a suite of recent advances in secure hardware technologies, in particular NVIDIA’s confidential compute mode available on Hopper and Blackwell. When combined with Tinfoil’s software stack, companies can prove their security claims like "we can't see and don’t log your queries.” Tinfoil guarantees that all data always stays private and cannot be accessed by anyone other than the end user -- not even by Tinfoil or the cloud provider it’s processed on. Everything can be made end-to-end encrypted and private with Tinfoil. The founding team combines deep academic and industry experience in security and Internet protocols. Tanya was previously a systems engineer at Cloudflare, where she built Internet security protocols used by billions, and contributed to the Workers AI platform. Jules and Sacha hold PhDs from MIT, where they worked on secure hardware, cryptography, and privacy technologies. Jules has also worked at NVIDIA on their confidential computing team. Tinfoil was born from our personal frustration with the false choice between access to powerful AI and the massive data privacy implications of deeply integrated AI. AI is a universal tool that becomes part of our personal lives and business workflows. In the process, it needs access to all personal, private, and proprietary data. Right now, the only solutions are data processing agreements (i.e., "pinky promises"), band-aids like PII redaction that don't work in practice, or AI locally/on-prem, which doesn't scale. Tinfoil promises to unlock significantly deeper AI adoption and integrations by making it easy to obtain true privacy, just as TLS on the Internet enabled e-commerce to flourish by securing credit cards on the network. Today we offer several self-serve products: - A consumer-facing chatbot that keeps your chats end-to-end encrypted and provides zero-access inference with powerful open-source models like Kimi, Gemma, and GLM. You can try it out for free: - A developer-friendly API that allows you to build AI applications where all user data is kept private and we as the inference provider cannot see any of the prompts. Our SDKs make sure that all relevant security measures are checked for you before even sending a single byte of data. Learn more: - An advanced confidential computing platform we call Tinfoil Containers that allows you to secure any Docker application. We make it easy to deploy your own logic and applications inside secure enclaves and prove to the world what code is running inside. This enables attested workloads and publicly verifiable privacy policies for sensitive applications. Learn more:

Tinfoil's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Tinfoil, Spring 2025 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Tinfoil

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Encrypted AI with verifiable privacy

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

We provide a platform that makes AI workloads secure and provably private by running them in confidential computing environments on NVIDIA GPUs. Our products include an end-to-end encrypted AI chatbot, a developer API ensuring zero-access inference, and Tinfoil Containers, which secure Docker apps inside attested enclaves. This lets companies prove they can't see user data, even while processing on the cloud.

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

We all live in San Francisco, CA, and the company remains headquartered here post-YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco has a strong ecosystem of security and AI experts, and all founders are here already, making it natural to base the company here.

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 Tinfoil YC application?

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