Undermind YC Application

Summer 2024Active

Undermind went through Y Combinator in the Summer 2024 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 2024
Industry: B2B
Status: Active
Launched: 2024

Founders

Joshua RametteFounder
Tom HartkeFounder

What Undermind does

At Undermind, we're building a search engine that can handle extremely complex questions. It’s geared at experts, like research scientists and doctors, who need to find very specific resources to solve high-stakes problems. We’ve rebuilt search from the ground up to address this. Our new approach employs high-quality LLMs to adaptively explore a database, mimicking how a human researcher carefully discovers information. This approach dramatically outperforms (by 10-50x) traditional keyword search and other modern AI-based retrieval methods. Our first target users are the 50 million researchers searching for scientific literature on PubMed and Google Scholar every month. We’ve have paying users across fields like medicine, ML, biotech, finance, and more.

Undermind's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Undermind, Summer 2024 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Undermind

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

An AI agent for scientific research

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

We're building a search engine designed for research scientists and doctors who need answers to detailed scientific questions. Our product uses large language models to explore scientific databases like a human would, digging deeper than keyword search. This approach helps users find very specific, high-stakes information faster and more accurately than existing tools.

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

We live in San Francisco, CA and plan to base Undermind here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco puts us close to biotech, AI talent, and user communities in research sciences. It's ideal for building and scaling a product aimed at scientific experts.

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 Undermind YC application?

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