Y Combinator

Editor's Rating  
Notes: The best accelerator you can possibly get into. Need we say more?

Y Combinator
Type	Startup Accelerator
City	Mountain View, California
Twitter	@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

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.

— Michael Siebel (CEO Y Combinator)

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

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

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

Successful Applications

• Dropbox’s Summer 2007 application

Indian Companies

This is the list of Indian companies that have gone through YC (33 companies in total)

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.