The startup I work for went through a niche IoT accelerator late in our lifecycle (post Series A.). No, not necessarily. Every startup in the batch had a uniq

The startup I work for went through a niche IoT accelerator late in our lifecycle (post Series A.). No, not necessarily. Every startup in the batch had a unique end goal, but they're not necessarily traction in the way YC appears to view it. Sometimes the end goal is a pre-traction milestone, like shipping our first set of physical chips. In this sense, it's a blurred line between pre-accelerators and early-stage accelerators Personally, I'd contend that YC today does not really like funding "very early-stage companies". Or at least, the definition of very early stage has been inflated from 2005 to now. The bar has been raised too high [1]; there are too many good applicants with significant product and/or traction already. 1: https://www.ycombinator.com/whynot/ https://www.ycombinator.com/whynot/