Y Combinator

Make something people
want.

5,000

Funded Startups

$800B

Combined Valuation

Top YC companies

We help founders make something people want and the results speak for themselves.

We help founders at their earliest stages regardless of their age.

We improve the success rate of our startups.

We give startups a huge fundraising advantage.

Our companies have a track record of becoming billion dollar companies.

Our formula for success.

YC is run by startup founders who have built exactly what they wanted when starting and growing a startup.

The most experienced partners

Each founder is assigned a dedicated YC partner who has mentored hundreds of YC companies. They have more data on what it takes to build a successful startup than any other early stage startup advisor. These partners read applications, interview companies, and mentor startups throughout the batch. You can access them in person, over email, and on Slack.

Investor network

YC companies have raised $85 billion dollars from the best investors in the world. Our founders have access to the YC Investor Database which has profiles and reviews for more than 50,000 startup investors.

Private social network only for founders

YC founders get to benefit from the collective wisdom of over 9000 YC alumni. They can access these alums through Bookface, our private social network. We have a forum for asking questions to the community, a founder directory for finding specific people who can provide advice and intros, and a company directory for finding potential customers.

Exclusive deals

YC founders have access to over 1000 deals from leading software companies. Every YC company gets free credits or significant discounts on hosting, banking, cap table management, back office, and much more. Companies report these deals to be worth in excess of $500,000.

The best written advice

YC founders get to benefit from our collective experience funding 5000 companies across almost 20 years. We have extensive documentation for common questions about fundraising, go to market, sales, product market fit, mental health, hiring, and much more.

Networks to build your team

Through Work at a Startup and HN, we help our founders hire the small number of early engineers and other team members critical to finding product market fit. At any given time there are 150,000+ candidates searching for jobs at early stage YC companies.

We put founders' interests first.

We don’t take a board seat.
We don’t demand 20% of your company.
We don’t take weeks/months to decide to invest
We don’t charge fees.
We don’t require decks, business plans, or MBAs.
We don't tell you what to do. We only offer advice.

Want to learn more?

YC Library

Videos, podcasts, and essays for startup founders

Keep up with the latest news, launches, jobs, and events from the YC community

Launch YC

Discover new YC companies and products

Work at a Startup

Find your next role at a YC startup

Blog

Essays, events, and announcements from YC

Co-Founder Matching

Meet a potential co-founder to start a startup with