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, 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, expanded 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.
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, U.S. 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.
Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over multiple locations, each location being a data center. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and typically using a "pay-as-you-go" model which can help in reducing capital expenses but may also lead to unexpected operating expenses for unaware users.
ZumoDrive is a defunct cloud-based file hosting service operated by Zecter, Inc. On December 22, 2010, Zecter announced its acquisition by Motorola Mobility. The service enabled users to store and sync files online, and also between computers using their HybridCloud storage solution; the latter functionality stopped working in approximately September 2011, while the former was undergoing formal takedown on May 1, 2012. ZumoDrive had a cross-platform client that enabled users to copy any file or folder into the ZumoDrive virtual disk that was then synced to the web and the users' other computers and hand-held devices. Files in the ZumoDrive virtual disk could be shared with other ZumoDrive users or accessed from the web. Users could also upload files manually through a web browser interface. A free ZumoDrive account offered 2 GB of storage, and users could upgrade to paid plans ranging from 10 GB to 500 GB for a monthly subscription fee. The ZumoDrive service was integrated into Yahoo! Mail, allowing users to send or receive any file on their ZumoDrive, and powers HP's recent CloudDrive technology, bundled on all new HP Mini netbooks.
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.
Actifio was a privately held information technology firm headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts. The company specialised in copy data virtualization for making information technology infrastructure more efficient by reducing unnecessary duplication of data. On December 3, 2020, Google announced it intended to acquire Actifio for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition closed on Monday Dec 14, 2020.
Nimbula was a computer software company that existed from 2008 to 2017. It developed software for the implementation of public and private cloud computing environments.
Nebula, Inc. was a hardware and software company with offices in Mountain View, California, and Seattle, Washington, USA. Nebula developed Nebula One, a cloud computing hardware appliance that turned racks of standard servers into a private cloud. The Nebula One private cloud system was built on the OpenStack open source cloud framework, as well as many other open source software projects.
Avere Systems was a privately held technology company that produces computer data storage and data management infrastructure. The company was founded in 2008 and is based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As of March 2017, the company had raised over $90 million in funding. On January 3, 2018, the company announced that it was being acquired by Microsoft.
DigitalOcean, Inc. is an American cloud infrastructure provider headquartered in New York City with data centers worldwide. DigitalOcean provides developers, startups, and SMBs with cloud infrastructure-as-a-service platforms.
Gusto is a company that provides a cloud-based payroll, benefits, and human resource management software for businesses based in the United States. Gusto handles payments to employees and contractors and also handles electronically the paperwork necessary to help client companies comply with tax, labor, and immigration laws. Gusto is operational in all 50 US states.
HackerRank is a tech company that focuses on competitive programming challenges for both consumers and businesses. Developers compete by trying to program according to provided specifications. HackerRank's programming challenges can be solved in a variety of programming languages and span multiple computer science domains.
Rescale is a software technology company that claims to provide "Intelligent Computing for Digital R&D", with a focus on high-performance computing, cloud management, and computer aided engineering.
Gigster provides a service that allows users to get tech projects built on demand. It was co-founded by Roger Dickey and Debo Olaosebikan and based in San Francisco, California. They received seed funding from Greylock Partners, Bloomberg Beta, as well as notable angel investors and founders Naval Ravikant of AngelList, Justin Waldron of Zynga, and Emmett Shear of Twitch, among others. They were a part of Y-Combinator's Summer 2015 class.
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.
Flirtey is a Reno, Nevada-based drone delivery company. The company completed the first Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)-approved drone delivery in the United States in 2015, the first FAA-approved urban delivery in March 2016 and the first FAA-approved commercial drone delivery to a customer home in July 2016. Flirtey is also developing air traffic control computer software for drones in a collaboration with NASA. One of the company's drones is in the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
Rigetti Computing is a Berkeley, California-based developer of quantum integrated circuits used for quantum computers. The company also develops a cloud platform called Forest that enables programmers to write quantum algorithms.
Mux is a video technology company headquartered in San Francisco, California. Mux focuses on video streaming infrastructure software and video performance analytics.
Fivetran is an Oakland, California-based technology company that develops a SaaS data integration service for companies to extract, transform and load (ETL) data from different sources into data warehouses.
