Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley start-up accelerator has picked 28 Indian start-ups for its 2019 winter batch, which is more than double of their earlier batch from India. Last year the strength was at 12 for its summer batch, said sources familiar with the development.*
This is a significant increase from the past few years as the accelerator usually picked up about 5-10 start-ups annually, from India. The accelerator claims to have more than 2000 start-ups under its portfolio which includes big names like Airbnb, DropBox, and Reddit. The reason for the increase in intake this year can be attributed to the early success of its previous picks like ClearTax, Meesho, and RazorPay.
This year’s batch includes start-ups like Squats Fitness which deals with health and corporate wellness services, UrbanKisan and AuthLayer, a banking security start-up. The list of selected start-ups this year, diversifies from consumer internet to agriculture, fitness and deep tech. Earlier the selections would only come from e-commerce based start-ups.
This development comes after the accelerator has decided to abruptly stop all its Chinese operations, as announced by the company in an official blog. This change in the policy of the accelerator can be an indication of the ongoing US and China trade war and the tensions rising in China administered Hong Kong. One more reason is the slowing venture capital market in China after years of funding. While the start-ups from China can still apply to the accelerator, it won’t have a separate country program for the country.
Usually, the accelerator hosts about 200 start-ups, 40% of them being from outside the United States. Taking into consideration the development, Indian start-ups will have a 15% share in the winter batch as compared to 7% in the previous batch.
Y-Combinator program typically runs for 2 to 3 months where the start-up runners can interact with industry experts, investors and fellow start-up founders. These selected start-ups can later pitch their ideas to potential investors on YC Demo Day.
* The story is based on media reports, citing sources from the start-ups picked up for this batch.
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