We are a heads down, drama free group so today, when a Y Combinator company copied us, it resulted in some excitement for the team. Here is a post on the YC copycat that we published on our team blog earlier today.

—————————–

We’re really proud of our data and technology at CB Insights. We’re also extremely excited about what we’ve done on the design and data visualization front to help our clients tell stories and get answers from the data.

And now it seems others are excited by it as well.

Yesterday, a Y Combinator company launched that has a striking resemblance to our own product. You can see screenshots below. Of course, using the exact color scheme and text could be oddly coincidental.

But on top of what is a copy, 12 people from the company have signed up for a CB Insights free trial since September 2014. They include the YC company’s CEO, Designer, Head of Product, Product Manager and Senior Ruby Developer among others. Our terms of service which all these users agreed prohibits this explicitly — You may not access the Services if You are Our direct competitor, except with Our prior written consent. In addition, You may not access Our Services for purposes of monitoring their availability, performance or functionality, or for any other benchmarking or competitive purposes.

The CEO also admitted to me via Twitter that they took CB Insights as a reference to launch fast. So copying to launch fast is ok it seems?  He does thankfully clarify that other than the design, their site is very different (phew).