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The Silicon Valley ambition is to ramp up a technical school startup that is such a unequaled idea it alter the commercial-grade universe and turns its founders into billionaires . Participating in the Valley ’s most famed inauguration factory , Y Combinator , is often part of that dream . Airbnb , Coinbase , and Stripe all got started there .
Yet , a deep dive into the information from all of the nearly 5,000 companies YC has backed to date reveal a surprising truth : YC startups do n’t have to be unique . Far from it .
YC commonly accept startups that are build alike or nearly selfsame product to previous YC grad . Some of them are verbatim competitors ; others dissent somewhat by targeting a new geography ( Asia or Latin America ) , or are a subset of a bombastic grocery ( point - of - sale software for stripe versus coffee bean shops ) .
data point analysis startupDeckmatchconducted the research , urge to look at competing YC products after a controversy over a YC - backed inauguration called PearAI . critic said thatPearAI ’s code editor product was n’t much more than a cloned versionof another YC product , called Continue — and PearAI ’s laminitis essentially admitted it . There were more reasons that Pear found itself in hot piss ( including the bravado of its founders and how it deal the open source licensing ) . But the uproar concluded with Pear ’s founders vowing tostart over from scratch .
YC CEO Garry Tan defended the company , and the fact that YC accepted this behavior , byposting on X , “ More pick is good , people build is good , if you do n’t like it do n’t use it . ”
This is clearly more than lip service for Tan , who has himself , for example , championed two police force bodycam startups a few age apart : Flock Safety ( Summer 2017 age group ) and Abel Police ( Summer 2024 ) . Along the same lines , more than a dozen startups building AI code editors went through the YC program between 2022 and 2024 — some in the same batch with the same YC collaborator .
When ask about its propensity to back competitors , a YC interpreter said that the organization is more concerned in the founders ’ backgrounds than their business concern ideas . “ YC invests in founders over estimate , concenter on soul with the potential to progress transformative ship’s company — no matter the space they operate in . Our investment strategy focalise on bet on the most bright founder with vision , resilience , and power to execute , which is readable in our RFS process , ” a spokesperson told TechCrunch .
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Some founders love YC’s approach
One of YC ’s big benefits is its intimate internet , where startups often seek customers , partners , and the comparable . Consequently , some alums dislike competition if they feel another ’s mathematical product mimics theirs , rather than differentiates . Around the time of the PearAI controversy , YC alum Bryan Onel , founder of security inauguration Oneleet , posted on Xabout his experience with this . A few others chimed in to sympathize . ( Onel did not reply to our requests for comment . )
Then again , other YC alum suppose this kind of lineal contention is good , specially when the same YC better half advises them . eating house PoS systems is one area that has been popular in YC , and YC alum Nick Evans , co - founder CEO of restaurant PoSAvocado , is fine with competition .
He should know . Evans famously founded a equipment - trailing inauguration called Tile , which went screwball with crowdfunding , raised money from traditional VCs , take on Apple ’s AirTags , then sold toLife360 in 2021 for $ 205 million .
“ I reckon it ’s stupid that most investors do n’t invest in competing companies , ” Evans severalize TechCrunch about YC contest . “ I need investors that deeply read my business and industriousness . How the hell would they have it away anything useful if they are n’t work with similar party ? startup do n’t pop off by slaying ; they go by suicide . You are not fighting against other startups . You are fighting against citizenry not giving a s — about your product . ”
Deep dive inspired by PearAI controversy
Before diving into the specifics of the family YC has particularly favour , it ’s deserving note that Deckmatch is not a YC company and has never apply to be one , CEO Leo Gasteen severalize TechCrunch .
Deckmatch was inspired to analyze YC product by the PearAI situation as a demonstration exam for its new product AlphaLens . Deckmatch betray intersection analytic thinking data on about 8 million inauguration to private marketplace participants like investors , and collective innovation and M&A teams .
It wants to do for product data point what PitchBook did for company - point data , Gasteen says . Earlier this calendar month , Deckmatch fire a $ 3.1 million seed round cobalt - lead by Alliance VC and Luminar Ventures , with participation from its pre - seed investors First Degree Capital and Skyfall Ventures . It ’s bring up $ 4.2 million to date , it says .
AlphaLens lets Deckmatch customers comb through its database to find unique and standardised intersection , work up spread charts , clump maps , and the corresponding . But theresults of the YC analysis , shared only with TechCrunch , should be engrossing to any founder wondering what kind of inauguration YC tends to accept .
Types of products YC loves, according to the data
grant to this data , the current popular merchandise class , each with at least a dozen startups , admit :
AI code editor : Beyond Continue and PearAI , another example is Void ( another open reservoir alternative to Cursor , the pop Andreessen Horowitz / OpenAI - back up startup ) . Then there ’s EasyCode , Ellipsis , Cosine , Greptile , and more , each applying AI to various cod tasks .
nutrient / drinkable / restaurant point of sale systems : Most of the PoS startups were accepted into the program between 2020 and 2023 , including Avocado , Dripos , or Latin American startup Polo .
byplay finance / payroll : With the success of YC alumna Gusto and Rippling came many challenger , some aim at different international market place . Examples admit Warp and Zeal .
AI sales and customer relationship direction . This is avery hot area of development for the heavy players(Salesforce , Microsoft)and startups . YC alums let in Apten , Persana AI , and Topo .
AI meeting help : Circleback , Onward , Sonnet , and Spinach AI are but a few examples .
AI effectual helper : Dioptra , Leya , and Tower are some examples .
Then again , several area were democratic but have been recently less so . These include :
Crypto trading program : Given the winner of YC grad Coinbase , YC was gung ho on this for a while , with about a XII grads , for the most part from 2014 to 2022 .
E - DoC memory platform : In the backwash of Shopify ( not a YC alum ) YC bear about a XII such company since 2018 , with the majority in the 2018 to 2022 time systema skeletale .
bodied expense cards : After YC alum Brex came many others , mostly from 2018 to 2022 .
