<div class="portada"><div class="meta">Menteia · Copiloto Aero · October 2026 · Confidential</div>

# Y Combinator application (raw draft)

**Copiloto Aero** — AI quoting cockpit for aerospace suppliers: reads requests and drawings, prepares the quote with the company's pricing engine, and the analyst approves every section.</div>


Answers ready to paste into the YC form (Winter 2027 closes on **Nov 2, 2026**, 8 pm Pacific time; confirm at ycombinator.com/apply). Only real data as of Oct 28, 2026; where there is no data we say so. At the end, the critique a partner would make.

Criteria used: ycinsight.com/apply (what partners look for in each question), ycinsight.com/yc-deal and ycinsight.com/yc-request-for-startups.

## Company

### Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

AI quoting cockpit for aerospace machine shops (46 characters)

### What is your company going to make?

Copiloto Aero turns every request-for-quote email into a quoting session for an aerospace supplier: it triages the drawing with vision, pulls similar past quotes, runs the company's own pricing engine and shows each section with its rationale so the analyst approves, asks or adjusts. It never invents a number and nothing goes to the customer without a human.

## Progress

### How far along are you?

In production at INDUMET (Mexican aerospace manufacturer) since September 2026: live inbox, live Pipedrive, 929 historical quotes and 4,600 line items ingested, 7 users. Revenue from INDUMET for the copilot: not confirmed.

### How long have each of you been working on this? How much of that has been full-time?

~7 weeks. ~5,800 lines of Python, 18 test files.

## Idea

### Why did you pick this idea to work on? Do you have domain expertise? How do you know people need what you're making?

INDUMET's analysts spent days per quote and the knowledge lived in a few people. We built it with them. Evidence: they use it daily; we have not measured time saved yet.

### Who are your competitors? What do you understand about your business that they don't?

Excel + email (status quo), CPQ/ERP (SAP), US AI quoting for machine shops (Paperless Parts), marketplaces (Xometry). What we understand: shops won't let an LLM price; the LLM must narrate their own engine.

### How do or will you make money? How much could you make?

Setup US$8–15k + US$1,500/month per company. Mexico has 386 aerospace companies (2024); US machine shops are the larger market.

### Tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered.

On the first real case the vision triage caught a part number in the email that didn't match the drawing.

## Founders

### Founders

Three co-founders: Rafael Herrera (CEO/CFO), Vladimir Díaz (CTO, software engineer, 20 years, PhD in business competitiveness and innovation from IQS–Ramon Llull, advised Ford, CANTV, Google and Globant) and Francisco D'Angelo Ohep (lawyer, LLM in international business law, AI-law specialist from Universidad de Salamanca). Vladimir wrote the code.

## Numbers YC will work out

| Question | Honest answer |
| --- | --- |
| Default alive? | No revenue confirmed. |
| Does it fit a 2026 RFS? | Fits 'Manufacturing software & US reshoring'. |
| Valuation we would ask for outside YC | US$1,800,000 pre-money |
| What YC offers | US$500k: US$125k for 7% (≈ US$1.79 M post) + US$375k on an uncapped SAFE with MFN |

## Blunt critique (what a partner would attack)
- Second-best candidate: real daily use at an industrial customer and it fits an RFS.
- It depends on a third party's pricing engine (NATALIA, from Cantera Digital). Without a generic connector, it is a custom project, not a product.
- Measure hours per quote before/after; that number is the whole application.
- Charge INDUMET now. A customer who doesn't pay proves nothing.

## What to do in the next 8 weeks
- Measure time per quote before and after.
- Sign a paid contract with INDUMET.
- Demo to 10 machine shops in Querétaro/Chihuahua.
- Generic pricing engine connector.