Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Stripe, Airbnb, Cruise, PagerDuty, DoorDash, Coinbase, Instacart, Dropbox, Twitch, Flightfox, and Reddit. The combined valuation of the top YC companies was more than $300 billion by January 2021. The company's accelerator program started in Boston and Mountain View, relocated to San Francisco in 2019, and has been entirely online since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Forbes characterized the company in 2012 as one of the most successful startup accelerators in Silicon Valley.
Airware was an American venture-funded startup that provided commercial unmanned aerial vehicles for enterprises. The company ceased operations on September 14, 2018.
Loopt was a company based in Mountain View, California, United States which provided a service for smartphone users to share their location selectively with other people. The service supported iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Windows Phones. Loopt's services had more than five million registered users and partnerships with every major U.S. mobile phone carrier. Their applications offered a variety of privacy controls. In addition to its core features, users also had the ability to integrate Loopt with other social networks, including Facebook and Twitter.
Justin Kan is an American internet entrepreneur and investor who co-founded the law-tech company Atrium where he served as CEO. He is the co-founder of live video platforms Justin.tv and Twitch, as well as the mobile social video application Socialcam.
Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, US that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software. Dropbox was founded in 2007 by MIT students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi as a startup company, with initial funding from seed accelerator Y Combinator.
Samuel H. Altman is an American entrepreneur, investor, programmer, and blogger. He is the CEO of OpenAI and the former president of Y Combinator.
Gregory Roman Skibiski, is an American entrepreneur. Skibiski founded Thasos Group, an artificial intelligence based data analytics firm that uses real-time locations from mobile phones worldwide to provide information for the financial services industry. Skibiski was also the Founder and former Chairman & CEO of Sense Networks, a New York City based company focused on analyzing big data from mobile phones and carrier networks. Skibiski is named lead inventor on three patent applications for analyzing emerging sensor data streams from mobile phones, culminating in the Macrosense, Citysense, and Cabsense products.
The Global Mobile Internet Conference is hosted annually in Beijing and Silicon Valley. Mobile executives, entrepreneurs, developers, and investors from around the globe and across platforms attend GMIC each year.
AngelPad is an American seed-stage startup incubator, launched in September 2010 by Thomas Korte and Carine Magescas with six other former Google employees as mentors. AngelPad provides mentorship, seed money, and networking at two 10-week courses per year.
Couple, formerly Pair, was a mobile app that provided a mobile messaging service for two people, especially romantic couples. Like many mobile phone messaging applications, Couple allows users to share text, photos, video and other content. It is a competitor to apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and KakaoTalk, but it is unique in that it is for communicating with exactly one other person. Couple is one of a slew of mobile applications that intentionally confine their communication to a small group, as opposed to large public or semi-public networks like Twitter.
Flutter is a gesture recognition technology startup based in San Francisco, California, United States. Founded by Navneet Dalal and Mehul Nariyawala, the company received early-stage funding from Y Combinator and was acquired by Google in October 2013.
Socialcam was a mobile social video application for iPhone, Android and Windows Phone, that was launched March 7, 2011 and ended October 28, 2015. It allowed users to capture and share videos online and on mobile, as well as via Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. By July 2012, the application passed 16 million downloads and was acquired by Autodesk for $60 million. Socialcam was founded by Michael Seibel, Ammon Bartram, and Guillaume Luccisano. Its facility was located in San Francisco, California, US.
Founded in 2012, Tilt was a crowdfunding company that allowed for groups and communities to collect, fundraise, or pool money online. James Beshara and Khaled Hussein launched the platform under the name Crowdtilt in February 2012 out of Y Combinator.
Wefunder is a crowdfunding service which connects startups with investors online. Wefunder uses a provision in the 2012 JOBS Act which allows unaccredited investors to purchase equity in early stage private companies.
Hoppit is a personalized search engine. It was founded by Steven Dziedzic and Emad Saghir in 2011 and headquartered in New York, NY. It was acquired in 2013 and is now a part of XO Group, Inc.
Product Hunt is an American website to share and discover new products. It was founded by Ryan Hoover in November 2013.
Strikingly is a website builder that allows the user, with little or no development experience, to create mobile optimized websites “within minutes”. The company takes a mobile-first approach, allowing users to create websites that are enhanced for viewing across all devices including desktops, tablets, and smartphones.
Webflow, Inc. is an American company, based in San Francisco, that provides software as a service for website building and hosting. Their online visual editor platform allows users to design, build, and launch websites.
Verbling is an online language learning platform that pairs individuals with language teachers via video chat. The company was created at Y Combinator in 2011. In 2015, Verbling raised $2.7 million in series A round funding. Funders have included Draper Fisher Jurvetson, SV Angel, Sam Altman, and Joshua Schachter.
Justin Yoshimura is an American technology entrepreneur and investor. He is the founder, chairman, and CEO of the holding company CSC Generation.
