Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 4,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, Stripe and Twitch. The combined valuation of the top YC companies was more than $600 billion by January 2023. The company's accelerator program started in Boston and Mountain View, expanded to San Francisco in 2019, and was entirely online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Forbes characterized the company in 2012 as one of the most successful startup accelerators in Silicon Valley.
Justin Kan is an American internet entrepreneur and investor. He is the co-founder of live video platforms Justin.tv and Twitch, as well as the mobile social video application Socialcam. He is also the cofounder and former CEO of law-tech company Atrium.
Samuel H. Altman is an American entrepreneur, investor, and programmer. He is the CEO of OpenAI and the former president of Y Combinator. Altman is also the co-founder of Loopt and Worldcoin.
Ben Huh is a South Korean-American internet entrepreneur and the former CEO of The Cheezburger Network, which at its peak in 2010 received 375 million views a month across its 50 sites.
Andreessen Horowitz is a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California.
Twilio is an American company based in San Francisco, California, which provides programmable communication tools for making and receiving phone calls, sending and receiving text messages, and performing other communication functions using its web service APIs.
LemonStand was a Canadian e-commerce company headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, that developed cloud-based computer software for online retailers. LemonStand was shut down on June 5th, 2019.
Clustrix, Inc. is a San Francisco-based private company founded in 2006 that develops a database management system marketed as NewSQL.
Wave is a company that provides financial services and software for small businesses. Wave is headquartered in the East Bayfront neighborhood in Toronto, Canada.
Upwave, formerly Survata, is a marketing analytics company based in San Francisco, California. It is the leading Analytics Platform that provides software and data to plan, measure and optimize brand marketing. Upwave rebranded from Survata in September 2020. Upwave’s data has been featured in outlets such as: Forbes, CBS News, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and USA Today. The company rebranded from Survata to Upwave in September 2020.
StartX is a non-profit startup accelerator and founder community associated with Stanford University.
Optimizely is an American company that provides digital experience platform software as a service. Optimizely provides A/B testing and multivariate testing tools, website personalization, and feature toggle capabilities, as well as web content management and digital commerce.
Flurry is an American mobile analytics, monetization, and advertising company founded in 2005. The company develops and markets a platform for analyzing consumer interactions with mobile applications, packages for marketers to advertise in-apps, as well as a service for applying monetization structures to mobile apps. Flurry analyzes 150 billion app sessions per month. The company's analytics platform tracks application sessions in iOS, Android, HTML5, and JavaME platforms. Flurry has raised a total of $65 million in funding since its founding and in March 2014 announced that it would partner with Research Now to create a panel database on mobile users. Flurry was acquired by Yahoo! on July 21, 2014 for somewhere between $200 and $300 million.
Swiftype is a search and index company based in San Francisco, California, that provides search software for organizations, websites, and computer programs. Notable customers include AT&T, Dr. Pepper, Hubspot and TechCrunch.
GitLab Inc. is an open-core company that operates GitLab, a DevOps software package which can develop, secure, and operate software. The open source software project was created by Ukrainian developer Dmytro Zaporozhets and Dutch developer Sytse Sijbrandij. In 2018, GitLab Inc. was considered the first partly-Ukrainian unicorn.
Unbabel is an artificial intelligence-powered human translation platform. The company has headquarters in Lisbon, Portugal, and San Francisco, California.
Lever is a software company headquartered in San Francisco, California and Toronto, Canada that provides an applicant tracking system for hiring. It was founded in 2012 by Nate Smith, Sarah Nahm, Randal Truong, and Brian Noguchi. It is backed by an advisory board which includes Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, Marissa Mayer, former CEO of Yahoo!, and Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of Yelp.
Drop is a coalition customer loyalty program, in which users earn points using their linked debit or credit cards. Users choose five rewards partners such as Sephora, Starbucks, Uber, and Whole Foods Market to earn points with. The program started in the Canadian market during August 2015 and expanded into the American market during October 2017, after a six-month private beta. The Drop Rewards program requires that users download a companion app on an iOS or Android device. According to Drop, the service was designed as a way for brands to earn exposure with millennials.
PagerDuty is an American cloud computing company specializing in a SaaS incident response platform for IT departments.
Dorm Room Fund is a $10 million American venture capital firm focused on investments in student-run startups. Established by First Round Capital in 2012, the firm is operated by full-time undergraduate and graduate students. It has backed companies that have raised a combined $300 million in venture capital from investors including Y Combinator, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Union Square Ventures. With investments in over 100 companies, the firm is one of the most active seed-stage investors in the US. The firm has teams in San Francisco, New York City, Philadelphia, and Boston.
