Y Combinator
Editor's RatingNotes: The best accelerator you can possibly get into. Need we say more?
Y Combinator | |
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Type | Startup Accelerator |
City | Mountain View, California |
@ycombinator | |
Website | Y Combinator |
Applications | Closed |
Deadline | March 24, 2018 (9:30 AM IST) |
Y Combinator is widely considered the world's best startup accelerator. Indian startups Marketfox, Razorpay, HackerRank and International startups Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe are among the 1500+ companies that have gone through YC.
Twice a year we invest a small amount of money ($120k) in a large number of startups (recently 105).
The startups move to Silicon Valley for 3 months, during which we work intensively with them to get the company into the best possible shape and refine their pitch to investors. Each cycle culminates in Demo Day, when the startups present their companies to a carefully selected, invite-only audience.
But YC doesn’t end on Demo Day. We and the YC alumni network continue to help founders for the life of their company, and beyond.
— Y Combinator [1]
Contents
Eligibility
The number 1 reason why companies don't get into YC is because they don't apply. One of the things YC is very particular about is having no prerequisites. We have taken companies that haven't been incorporated to companies with $40M revenue run rates and everything in between. YC demo day brings together the best early stage investors to the best Series A / B investors, and the YC alumni community has billion dollar companies to companies that are just starting. There really isn't a company that is too early or too late for YC.
Application Process
- If you want to apply, please submit your application online by 8 pm PT on October 3. Groups that submit early have a small advantage because we have more time to read their applications.
- On October 24, by 10PM, we’ll invite the groups that seem most promising to meet us in Mountain View in early November. We’ll reimburse reasonable travel expenses.
- We decide who to fund after each day of interviews.
— Y Combinator [4]
Application Walkthrough
How to Apply to Y Combinator
- Probably the biggest thing people don’t understand about the process is the importance of expressing yourself clearly. Every year we get some applications that are obviously good, some that are obviously bad, and in the middle a huge number where we just can’t tell. The idea seems kind of promising, but it’s not explained well enough for us to understand it. The founders seem like they might be good, but we don’t get a clear enough picture of them to say for sure.
- If we get 1000 applications and have 10 days to read them, we have to read about 100 a day. That means a YC partner who reads your application will on average have already read 50 that day and have 50 more to go. Yours has to stand out. So you have to be exceptionally clear and concise. Whatever you have to say, give it to us right in the first sentence, in the simplest possible terms.
- The best answers are the most matter of fact. It’s a mistake to use marketing-speak to make your idea sound more exciting. We’re immune to marketing-speak; to us it’s just noise.
— Paul Graham (Founder Y Combinator), How to Apply to Y Combinator [5]
The Application Video
In the video please introduce yourselves, explain what you’re doing and why, and tell us anything else you want to about the founders or the project.
— Y Combinator, The Application Video [6]
Successful Applications
- Dropbox’s Summer 2007 application [7]
Indian Companies
This is the list of Indian companies that have gone through YC (33 companies in total) [8][9]
Startup | Founders | Batch | City | Crunchbase | One-line Summary |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Cashfree | Reeju Datta Akash Sinha |
S17 | Bangalore | CB Profile | Next-Gen digital payments provider for India. |
CureSkin | Ramakrishna R Guna Kakulapati |
S17 | Bangalore | CB Profile | AI dermatologist for India. |
Fastpad | Sanat Ghosh Abhishek Anand |
S17 | Bangalore | CB Profile | Hiring Software for India. |
LotusPay | Atma Krishna |
S17 | New Delhi | CB Profile | Recurring payments solution for businesses in India. |
NextDrop | Ashish Jhina Devin Miller Pronita Saxena Thejesh GN Quijano Flores |
S17 | Bangalore | CB Profile | NextDrop is the water marketplace for urban India. We connect water buyers with suppliers. |
Piggy | Nikhil Mantha Ankush Singh Kunal Sangwan |
S17 | Mumbai | CB Profile | App for Indians to make investments in mutual funds, manage their investment portfolios, and save for retirement. |
WheelStreet | Moksha Srivastava Pranay Shrivastava |
S17 | Bangalore | CB Profile | WheelStreet is a Motorbike rental marketplace that connects motorcycle rental vendors in India with riders. |
MarketFox | Mohammed Aboobacker Sony Mathew Sooraj Chandran Sojan V Jose |
W17 | Bangalore | CB Profile | Marketing automation platform optimized for mobile and web. |
NanoNets | Sarthak Jain Prathamesh Juvatkar |
W17 | San Francisco, California | CB Profile | Easy to use Machine Learning API. |
Bicycle AI | Abhishek Nayak Arpit Mohan Arvind Singh |
W17 | Bangalore | CB Profile | Bicycle AI provides customer support as a service (Machine + Human Intelligence). |
Supr Daily | Puneet Kumar Shreyas Nagdawane |
W17 | Mumbai | CB Profile | Daily milk delivery service in India |
ServX | Akansh Sinha Anubhav Deep |
W17 | New Delhi | CB Profile | ServX is India's premier mobile app for auto repairs. |
Wifi Dabba | Shubhendu Sharm Karan Lakshman |
W17 | Bangalore | CB Profile | Building largest and affordable wireless ISP in India. |
Playment | Siddharth Mall Ajinkya Malasane Akshay Lal |
W17 | Bangalore | CB Profile | Mechanical Turk for enterprises. |
Bulk MRO | Devang Shah Gaurang Shah |
W17 | Mumbai | CB Profile | Bulk MRO is the Alibaba for Enterprises in India. |
Dost Education | Sneha Sheth Sindhuja Jeyabal |
W17 | San Francisco, California | CB Profile | Empower parents of any literacy level to get their child ready for kindergarten. |
Credy | Pratish Gandhi Harshit Vaishnav |
W17 | Bangalore | CB Profile | Credy is an online platform for P2P lending, backed by biometric ID and leveraging India's latest digital infrastructure. |
DocTalk | Akshat Goenka | W17 | Mumbai | CB Profile | Paid WhatsApp connecting Indian patients to Indian doctors. |
Innov8 | Ritesh Malik Shailesh Gupta |
S16 | New Delhi | CB Profile | Co-working offices to startups, freelancers and SMEs in India. |
Meesho | Vidit Aatrey Sanjeev Barnwal |
S16 | Bangalore | CB Profile | Meesho is the simplest way for Indie sellers in India to setup, manage and grow their business on Facebook and WhatsApp. |
Drivezy (JustRide) | Ashwarya Singh Vasant Verma Abhishek Mahajan Amit Sahu |
S16 | Bangalore | CB Profile | Airbnb for cars in India. |
Kisan Network | Aditya Agarwalla Sanjay K Agarwalla |
W16 | New Delhi | CB Profile | Online marketplace for Indian agriculture. |
SHRI | Anoop Jain | W16 | Bihar | CB Profile | Sanitation and Health Rights. |
RedCarpetUp | Kartik Venkataraman Abhay Tamaria |
S15 | New Delhi | CB Profile | A modern online payment gateway for India. |
SimpleMoney | Pranshu Maheshwari Vamsi Gullapalli |
S15 | Chennai | CB Profile | Portfolio tracking for Indian investments. |
Auro Robotics | Nalin Gupta Srinivas Reddy |
S15 | Santa Clara, California | CB Profile | Autonomous / self driving / driverless shuttles for in-campus travel. |
Razorpay | Harshil Mathur Shashank Kumar |
W15 | Bangalore | CB Profile | A modern online payment gateway for India. |
Zip Phone | S14 | CB Profile | Whatsapp for voice. | ||
ClearTax | Archit Gupta | W14 | New Delhi | CB Profile | Income Tax efiling in India. |
Markupwand | Rajagopal Natarajan Allagappan Muthuraman Surendran Mahendran |
S12 | Shutdown | CB Profile | Shutdown |
Plivo | Venky Balasubramanian Michael Ricordeau |
S12 | San Francisco, California | CB Profile | APIs for Voice calls and SMS. |
TapToLearn | Roby John Avinash Pandey |
W12 | Menlo Park, California | CB Profile | Educational applications for touch-screen devices. |
HackerRank | Vivek Ravisankar Harishankaran Karunanidhi |
S11 | Bangalore | CB Profile | Hire the Best Engineers. |