Y Combinator
San Francisco · Pre-Seed–Seed · 22 people tracked
Investment thesis
Y Combinator targets early-stage founders with nascent or non-existent products and revenue, investing uniformly across all sectors. The firm provides intensive three-month acceleration programs combined with long-term network support to maximize founder success and company potential.
Source: firm website, verified Jul 17, 2026.
Team · 22 people
from the firm's websiteCo-founder of Creative Market, a platform that has generated over $100M in sales for independent creators worldwide.
Co-founder and CTO of PagerDuty, the first incident management platform listed on NYSE:PD and used by half of the Fortune 500. Graduate of University of Waterloo and University of Toronto.
Co-founder and CTO of Reverie Labs, acquired by Ginkgo Bioworks. Deep learning researcher specializing in language, vision, and biology.
Co-founder and CEO of Perfect Audience, acquired by Marin Software. Active angel investor and Slate contributor.
Co-founder and CEO of BackType, acquired by Twitter. Launched Twitter's Ad Center and grew the division's revenue to over $1B.
Co-founder and CEO of Bump, which reached 150M+ users before acquisition by Google. Co-founder of Google Photos, which surpassed 1B users.
Co-founder of Pincites, acquired by Filevine. Previously co-founded Dependabot, acquired by GitHub, and led product and engineering at GoCardless.
Led Growth at Airbnb for 4.5 years and served as Head of Growth at Voxer. Co-founder of Heysan.
Co-founder and CEO of Triplebyte, acquired by Karat, and Auctomatic, acquired by Live Current Media. Oxford graduate.
Co-founder of AtoB, a fintech startup valued at $800M. Immigrated to San Francisco on an O-1 visa at age 16 from India.
Co-founder of Scribd, one of the top 100 websites globally. Harvard Computer Science dropout.
Previously led marketing at investment bank Adams Harkness where she oversaw a major company rebranding. Author of Founders at Work, a collection of interviews with startup founders. Holds a BA in English from Bucknell.
Co-founder of Algolia, a search API platform used by millions of developers. Holds a PhD in Computer Science.
Computer scientist and author of several books on Lisp and hacking. Co-founded Viaweb in 1995, which became Yahoo Store in 1998, widely recognized as the first SaaS company. Developed spam filtering algorithms. Holds degrees from Cornell and Harvard.
Co-founder of Optimizely, which grew to over $100M ARR before acquisition. Holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from UIUC.
MIT professor of computer science and member of the PDOS research group with extensive publications on wireless networks, distributed systems, and peer-to-peer applications. Made significant early contributions to computer security. Holds degrees from Harvard.
Co-founder of Monzo, which raised £500M and serves approximately 10% of the UK population. Founded GoCardless and was awarded an OBE in 2019.
Roboticist who developed the first dynamically balancing biped robot in 2007 and published research on network congestion control, signaling protocols, and file system performance. Holds a BEng from Carleton and PhD in Computer Science from Harvard.
Co-founder and CEO of Clever, acquired for $500M. The platform is used by 60% of US students.
Frequently asked questions
- What stage does Y Combinator invest at?
- Y Combinator invests at the Pre-Seed, Seed stages.
- What is Y Combinator's typical check size?
- Y Combinator typically writes checks of $500K – $500K.
- What sectors does Y Combinator focus on?
- Y Combinator focuses on Sector Agnostic.
- Where is Y Combinator located?
- Y Combinator is headquartered in San Francisco, US.
- Does Y Combinator lead rounds?
- Y Combinator typically participates in rounds rather than leading them.
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