Y Combinator Management, LLC (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator and venture capital firm launched in March 2005 which has been used to launch more than 4,000 companies. The accelerator program started in Boston and Mountain View, expanded to San Francisco in 2019, and was entirely online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies started via Y Combinator include Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Reddit, Stripe, and Twitch.
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. In 2024, he announced the launch of Stash, an e-commerce and payment platform tailored for video game developers.
Samuel Harris Altman is an American entrepreneur and investor best known as the CEO of OpenAI since 2019. Altman is considered to be one of the leading figures of the AI boom. He dropped out of Stanford University after two years and founded Loopt, a mobile social networking service, raising more than $30 million in venture capital. In 2011, Altman joined Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, and was its president from 2014 to 2019.
Hacker News (HN) is a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship. It is run by the investment fund and startup incubator Y Combinator. In general, content that can be submitted is defined as "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
Lu Qi is a Chinese-American software executive and engineer who is the head of MiraclePlus, a startup incubator in China. Previously, Lu was the head of Y Combinator's China until it was shut down. He was formerly the chief operating officer of Baidu until he stepped down in May, 2018. He has served as the executive vice president of Microsoft, leading development of Bing, Skype, and Microsoft Office, and software engineer and manager for Yahoo!'s search technology division.
The Muse is a New York City-based online career platform founded in 2011 by Kathryn Minshew, Alexandra Cavoulacos, and Melissa McCreery.
Canopy Labs is a customer analytics company headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada with offices in San Francisco. It was founded in 2012 and offers SaaS marketing analytics for businesses and organizations. The company is an alumnus of the Y Combinator accelerator program. Canopy Labs was acquired by Drop.
Jared Friedman is an American entrepreneur and angel investor. He is a partner at Y Combinator in San Francisco, where he invests in and helps startups. Previously, Jared was the co-founder and CTO at Scribd, a digital library and document-sharing platform, which has 80 million users.
Product Hunt is an American website to share and discover new products. It was founded by Ryan Hoover in November 2013.
Meta was a company that designed augmented reality products. The company was founded by Meron Gribetz in 2012, based on the "Extramissive spatial imaging digital eye glass" technology invented by Gribetz and Mann originally filed with the US Patent and Trademark office Jan 3, 2013.
AirPair is a service and eponymous company that connects people who need help with programming issues and people who can help them. Unlike services such as oDesk and Elance, AirPair is not a service for outsourcing programming tasks, but rather a service that facilitates one-off knowledge transfers from people with highly specialized knowledge of particular technology stacks or programming issues to people who are in need of specialized help.
TeamNote is a mobile-first business communication and collaboration software developed by the Hong Kong based technology company TeamNote Limited. TeamNote is a product that is provided as a white label solution to corporations and deployed in a private cloud or an on-premises server. It allows users to send text messages and voice messages, share images, documents, user locations, and other content. It is not available for download on App Store (iOS) or in Google Play. TeamNote adds new users by sending out links or manual deployment.
Aaron Iba is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. He is known for co-authoring Etherpad, co-founding AppJet, and for his work as a partner in Y Combinator. Iba graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005 with a degree in Mathematics.
Evan Beard is an American entrepreneur, engineer, and co-founder with Ashton Kutcher of the media company A Plus (aplus.com). A Plus ranks among the largest websites in the US, with 30 to 50 million monthly unique visitors, and six months after launch was the fastest growing website in comScore's Mobile Metrix database. Beard has been recognized on the Forbes "30 under 30" list which features the "brightest young entrepreneurs, breakout talents and change agents" and Business Insider's list of the "most inspiring and influential people in New York tech". Prior to A Plus, Beard co-founded Etacts and ArmorHub, both acquired by publicly traded companies.
Meron Gribetz is an Israeli technology entrepreneur. He was the founder and CEO of Meta, a Silicon Valley technology company that produced augmented reality products, closed in 2019. He was a founder of Inner Cosmos, makers of a digital pill designed to re-balance brain networks, and continued as CEO As of 2023.
Forever Labs is a longevity company that uses an outpatient procedure to harvest adult Mesenchymal stem cells for possible future medical treatment. While the collection and storage of infant cord blood has become commonplace since the 1990s, Forever Labs is notable for being the first company to offer collection and storage of adult stem cells.
Mux is a video technology company headquartered in San Francisco, California. Mux focuses on video streaming infrastructure software and video performance analytics.
Tenderd is software for heavy industries to manage their equipment and fleet. Using the technology companies can increase their operational efficiency, safety, and reduce environmental footprint. The company is based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Tizeti is a fixed wireless broadband Internet service provider operated by Tizeti Inc, using Wireless to provide unlimited internet to residential and small business customers in Africa. It is also used to connect its base stations to customer buildings. Tizeti currently operates within Lagos, Ogun, Port Harcourt, Benin, Oyo, and Accra.
Ironclad is a software as a service company that makes contract management software. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Ironclad provides a platform for legal and business teams to create, store, and manage contracts online in a process known as contract lifecycle management.
