Yuma AI YC Application

Winter 2023Active

Yuma AI went through Y Combinator in the Winter 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: Winter 2023
Industry: B2BOperations
Team size: 26
Status: Active
Launched: 2023

Founders

Guillaume LuccisanoFounder

What Yuma AI does

## What is Yuma AI? Yuma is automating customer support by providing an AI Support Agent orchestration platform. Yuma provides autonomous AI agents dedicated to customer service and e-commerce. We integrate directly with help desk software (Zendesk, Kustomer, Gorgias, etc.) and focus on helping large Shopify brands deal with their high volume of support requests. Top merchants using Yuma can automate up to 80% of their support tickets fully autonomously. ## Why do Shopify merchants need Yuma? There are thousands of large Shopify merchants around the world generating $10M+ a year. Most of them have taken over some niches and are great at what they do: selling their products. But they all have one thing in common: they all hate customer support. It's a burden for them and a huge source of cost, as they receive hundreds of requests per day. Some of them have dozens of support agents on staff, usually offshore, and the overall quality is still often pretty poor while staff turnover remains high. Those merchants have been promised automation for years but have always been disappointed by the outcome. As customers, we have all had to live through a terrible support automation experience before, so this is no secret, and everyone knows that the current state of the technology is quite bad. ## Yuma is solving this in a few ways: Yuma isn't just another RAG chatbot. Our platform provides autonomous AI agents dedicated to support and ecommerce. These agents are powered by knowledge, follow processes, and are managed by our in-house AI orchestration technology. This ensures safety, control, and quality at every step. We believe that to truly automate customer support, we must develop a platform that mimics the actions of a human support agent. That's exactly what we've been doing. Currently, our top merchants are automating 60% of their support tickets through Yuma. Yuma can fetch information from external services and take actions in other apps as needed to resolve each ticket. We are laser-focused on building the best AI support agent platform and aim to achieve 80% true automation in the next few months. ## Fun Fact Yuma got started by accident. This is my third YC startup after Socialcam (W12) and Triplebyte (S15). I released Yuma as a prototype for fun in mid-December 2022 and was overwhelmed with demo requests. That's when I knew I was onto something and had to turn this into a real company, once again.

Yuma AI's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Yuma AI, Winter 2023 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Yuma AI

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

The AI Support Agent for Ecommerce

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

We make an AI support agent platform that automates customer service for large Shopify merchants by integrating with their help desk software and autonomously resolving tickets. Our AI agents act like human support staff: they use knowledge, follow processes, and can fetch information or take actions in other applications to solve customer requests without manual intervention.

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

We are based in Boston, MA, and the company will remain here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

Boston is where our founder and core team live. We have built early traction here with local and remote customers, and the location supports recruiting and operations.

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 Yuma AI YC application?

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