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Startups that launched at Y Combinator S16 Demo Day 2
- Azuolas 10y agolooks promising
- source99 10y agoCan someone explain why their are so many startups concentrating on India? Is it in part due to the overall expansion of the internet and economy?
- pavlov 10y agoAFAIK, Y Combinator had a particular focus on international startups for this round, and India is an enticing emerging market.
- joshgoldberg 10y agoSo what if it's India? I bet you wish it was in SV asshole...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- runesoerensen 10y agoRelevant article from a couple of days ago: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/trend-tracking/The-Y-Combinator-touch-How-this-Silicon-Valley-incubator-is-helping-Indian-entrepreneurs/articleshow/53805574.cms http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/trend-tracking/The-Y-Comb... A few snippets: - "Once upon a time, bright graduates from top Indian colleges took up wellpaying jobs with MNCs or headed to the Ivy Leagues for higher education. That is passe. More and more of them now harbour startup dreams." - "There is no doubt that India will be the fastest growing economy in the world for the next 10+ years. We will see many more $100M in revenue businesses being built in India" - "The first startup we funded that focused on building for the Indian market was ClearTax in 2014. The Times of India wrote a story about ClearTax being in YC - and after that we started seeing more Indian founders applying to YC. The increase in Indian companies in YC is likely reflective of the fact that we're seeing more applications from India. After the US, India is the country that sends us the most applications."
- mkagenius 10y agototal 3 out of 92 is 3.2% of total. GDP (PPP) of India vs United States (ppp) is 30%. So..
- ryandamm 10y agoPPP is a kind of useless statistic for comparison, here. YC partners are looking for real-money returns. That said, I'm bullish on India in the 10-20 year time table. Eventually it will be the most populous country in the world, and wealth will eventually track population. I think.
- 1_listerine_pls 10y agoMy guess is that the market is getting crowded in developed countries. It's easier to find a simple solution for a large problem in a place with scarcity of good developers.
- ryandamm 10y agoLarge population, favorable demographics (entering its 'demographic surplus' phase), lots of untapped potential? Also: English-speaking, personal and professional ties to SV? Solid educational system, history of in-sourcing US-based IT and tech development? Or maybe it's just a big love-fest for Narendra Modi. I have no idea.
- hackuser 10y ago> Solid educational system My impression is the opposite, but maybe I'm misinformed ?
- hnarayanan 10y agoThe system is heterogeneous, tracking wealth distribution inequality, but can be very good.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoThis is an awesome list, I find the drone defense an interesting one too. There have been reports of drones near Moffet being commandeered and then sent into the Bay. Seemed like it would invoke a lawsuit, but if law enforcement was doing that, I could see it working out.
- callmeed 10y agoThere's a similar startup in our little accelerator here. Interesting space.
- spitfire 10y agoDrone deense/hijacking is a funny subject. Wonder how many weeks it'll take for people to write an autopilot-on-loss-of-signal for drones. In fact that's sort of the endgame for drones. People don't control the drones, they tell them what to do/where to go. The autopilot figures out how to complete that task.
- dimdimdim 10y agoAt the very same time it is trivial to update the drones of today to use a secure mutual authentication mechanism which the "drone defender" cannot break into. So, even if there is a spectrum DoS (which might be illegal to do for anyone apart from law enforcement) its not that the defender will take over the drone. This is a cat n mouse game where the drone creator always has an advantage.
- ryandamm 10y agoYeah, but GPS isn't a handshake, and most commodity drones rely on it. You can't take it over, but you can probably blind it.
- WalterSear 10y agoIran claims to have captured drones by spoofing the GPS.
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- spitfire 10y agoThere's actually some interesting companies in this batch. Particularly the ones going after boring, but lucrative markets.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- chejazi 10y agoAfter skimming both techcrunch articles, it seems like there were more hardware startups on day 1.
- jrudolph 10y agoIs it just me or does anyone else think that many of the startups from Day 1 and Day 2 are well beyond the "seed" stage that YC claims to target? I get that YC is a perfect program to prepare a company for raising significant investment, so it makes perfect sense for the startups to join even at a later stage. Also derisks YCs investment on the standard terms (i.e. 7% of a later-stage company for 120k$ is a better deal than 7% for 120k$ at an entirely unproven company). Example: Ohmygreen claims it's a logistics company (which implies CapEx unless they rent, which eats margins) and already has 800k MRR. Doesn't quite fit my definition of "seed" stage.
- tyre 10y agoThis is a good question, and, as a YC founder presenting today, I can give an answer. "Seed" has shifted. In the early days of YC, you came in with an idea and tried to build something people want. Note that it is called "Demo Day", because you would literally demo your product. Today, it's just so much easier to start a company. You can try out an idea in a weekend, so the 3-month program of YC is focused on growth. As you said, they are preparing companies to raise seed capital, and the bar for that has risen considerably.
- sidlls 10y agoSurely you're exaggerating. You can create a toy program or even a very basic (most likely web-based application) that solves some problem in a weekend, but there really are very few lucrative companies or ideas that can be accurately "tried out" in a single weekend. If these companies are "seed" stage companies, then I'd argue it isn't that any bar has been raised, but that "seed" has come to mean something entirely different. Any company that has $800k MRR is (well) past seed-stage.
- confiscate 10y agoYes I have the same question too. The $120k for 7% is meant for seed stage startups where $120k is a Big Deal. If you already have $800k revenue each month, what is the math behind giving up 7% of your company, permanently, for $120k?
- kkt262 10y agoSimple Pickup is in Y Combinator. Nice!
- confiscate 10y agoAh I can't find them on the list! Where are they? It's awsome Simple Pickup is in YC!
- confiscate 10y agoOh it's Jumpcut. Way to go! Goooooooo Jumpcut!! Yo that photo of Jumpcut -- the guy in the photo does not look like Jesse at all. Bring back the real Jesse!
- netvarun 10y agoThe TechCrunch writers seem to have gotten the wrong chat platform under Meesho's description. Empirically I don't know of any friends in India using WeChat. Let alone selling products through it. WhatsApp, however, is omnipresent. Just checked Meesho's website (http://meesho.com http://meesho.com) It only lists WhatsApp as its supported platform.
- rajeck 10y agoMeesho caught my eye- but surely there is a typo in its description: "Over 50 million small businesses sell over WeChat in [India]" There are only 50-70 million WeChat users outside of China in total - according to WeChat themselves. http://bit.ly/2bUmiBE http://bit.ly/2bUmiBE
- danieltillett 10y agoThis is wrong - it is Whatsapp. This is just more of the quality proofreading we have come to love from Techcrunch.
- hkmurakami 10y ago>Quero Education is an ed-tech startup out of Brazil that is promising to help solve under-enrollment issues at Brazilian universities. Contrary to what most of us would think, coming from schools challenged daily by a lack of professors and dormitories, enrollment at Brazilian schools would need to double to just match the number of available seats. This is perplexing to me at first glance so hopefully someone from the country can shed some light on this issue. In the states, if anything, we've oversold the college education (and advanced degrees like law degrees) to the point where a great number of students are unable to attain the careers (implicitly) promised by these degrees. They are often crushed by a mountain of debt and struggle to pay it back over a lifetime. Prospective students have finally caught onto this (hooray Internet!), and many lower tier law schools are shutting down. Brazil, according to this blurb, does not have this problem. In fact it has the opposite problem of not enough students? If this were the States I'd be quick to dismiss it as "the schools don't provide value to students, thus they are underenrolled, and they should shut down." But this is probably not the case -- are prospective students genuinely missing a great opportunity to educate themselves and set themselves up to greatly improve their lifetime earning potential? Would love to get a local perspective here.
- pmtarantino 10y agoSometimes you don't attend college because a) you are not ready (your high school preparation wasn't good, so you will likely fail), b) the costs are really high so you can't afford it. You start working on the side while you are in college, and after some months of struggling, you finally chose the job instead the education. I am from Argentina, and this happens too.
- iurisilvio 10y agoTechcrunch did a nice interview with them, asking some of your same questions. These private colleges have a lot of government support through financial aid to poor/black/minorities attend a college. These colleges are profitable even with empty seats. Filling these empty seats for half of the price is awesome, but they won't crash without it. The company behind most of these colleges merged with another one this year and their stocks (KROT3 and ESTC3) are growing fast (50%+ this year). https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/19/quero-education-an-online-college-marketplace-in-brazil-looks-to-educate-u-s-investors/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/19/quero-education-an-online-...
- aaronbrethorst 10y agoInteresting, when did Yahoo sell off the Jumpcut.com domain name? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumpcut.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumpcut.com
- zaroth 10y agoFlex sounded fairly interesting, but I wonder how they can sell without more review. I was expecting more standardized forms and language on their site than I got. The 'How it Works?' / 'Is it Safe' FAQs seems not nearly technical enough. No known expiration date, really? As a guy am I not meant to fully understand how the device works? Obviously the 'Try it Free' should have a way to email your wife, right? Or are men not supposed to recommend feminine hygiene products to their wives? One for $3.95 (shipping cost) per address is a great marketing tactic. Anyway, I get a kick out the fact this is a YC funded startup.
- somenomadicguy 10y agoLegalist just makes me sad, but I guess there's nothing more American than suing for absolutely anything. It's like the founders were looking for a business model that was even more parasitic than patent squatting. As a nomad, airfordable is the best of the bunch to me. It almost balances out the karma of Legalist.
- kchoudhu 10y ago"We're definitely not Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan." You are. Why not own it? Not all businesses need to smell like a bed of roses.
- koolba 10y ago> You are. Why not own it? Not all businesses need to smell like a bed of roses. Exactly. I know a guy that literally runs a business that smells like shit. They pump septic tanks and he's doing great. There's a natural apprehension for competitors to enter a market like that, must be similar for things that figuratively smell like shit too (like this).
- somenomadicguy 10y agoSanitation work like Septic is far more important than any cute software start-up, that's for sure. I think my last honest job was cleaning out chicken-stalls on a farm when I was 12.
- 3pt14159 10y agoYou think their parasites because you don't trust the American judicial system. That is fair, but the fundamental nature of what Legalist does is actually quite good. Justice shouldn't be denied to someone just because they can't afford to afford the legal fees. Sure, lawyers can take clients on contingency, but they are often cash-poor because law school is expensive, so the rate of return needs to be much higher to justify the risk and delayed payment. Investors, on the other hand, lack the information necessary to judge whether or not a case has merits because they usually don't have the right background knowledge about the law or the domain of the case. If Legalist were launching from, say, Canada or the EU I'm not so sure it would be so negatively received; and I would certainly want it to exist if I were a poor person with mercury poisoning.
- throwawayReply 10y ago> Oleg Rogynskyy and his team at People.ai want to help companies understand what sales teams are doing on a daily basis. People.ai integrates with calendars, phones, and emails and logs sales activity that leads to closing deals. The idea is that sales teams can track best practices from top performers and close more deals. I'm all for taking human bias out of learning, but isn't there a great danger of cargo-culting a sales team based on this? Perhaps diversity is important to generate both long and short term growth, as well as the fact that there's a danger that if everyone is operating in a more similar manner that activity shifts from growth to a zero-sum game.
- wastedhours 10y agoAgree with this. I work in a place where the team's split into 4 quadrants, all looking at different areas of the marketplace (and different levels of interaction) - whilst best practice is shared between them, knowing that each quad will do different things and function in different ways is key to widening reach.
- TeeWEE 10y agoHuh? LookLive has gone bankrupt and was then partially bought, and know the new owners are like 'look what we built'.. And now its in YCombinator? Wtf?
- inthewoods 10y agoOneChronos is the most interesting to me reviewing their overview/FAQ of their technical approach. Somewhat reminds me of the Jim Simons/RenTec patents.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- losteverything 10y agoVetcove - my own knowledge says this is just another attempt to centralize. Vet care is too expensive and this doesn't address the cost Robby is directly in what I do. Although I can't see how it will work yet I believe certain things. Towns need to declare whether robotic driverless "Vehicles" can exist on their taxpayers' roadways. Like cell towers, towns need to make rules before Robby or similar non-human machines are sharing common free (roadways) and private (houses and land) space with taxpayers. Property owners are fickle. Dogs are a significant obstacle.
- eitally 10y agoVet care is not remotely expensive (compared to human medical care, which is completely outrageous). Vets are required to have the same amount of training as MDs (BS + 4yr DVM + Internship + Residency + optional further specialization training & fellowships), yet the starting salaries are in the $100k range. I'd argue that $3-5k for a major surgery is good value. The problem is insurance companies. By shifting the payer away from the consumer, prices over the past few years have started unpleasantly blowing up.
- losteverything 10y ago<Vet care is not remotely expensive Absolutely false if one has to worry about money. Insurance is a puny percentage at the practice I know and the hundreds of pet owners I chat with daily. < $3-5k for a major surgery That is a lot LOT of money in my mind. Remember this is your pet. Usually the cost is sticker shock especially for Specialized Care and there is no alternative. People do not expect to have bills of $500, $1,000, $1,500 and more for routine things. [ The surgeon charges $8 a minute ]
- garry 10y agoThat you guys are discussing veterinary care and insurance shows that you don't actually know what Vetcove does. They actually are a B2B marketplace for veterinary supplies used by vet clinics. Consumers don't use it at all, and it certainly has nothing to with pet insurance. It saves clinics a lot of money already. A reminder that it's fun to comment from the armchair, but you should at least learn what the business actually is before you do.
- pragone 10y agoI'm really confused about "RigPlenish". One, who the hell is taking 40 minutes to write their chart? Second, I fail to grasp they can create a meaningful patient record (a legal document providing critical insight into the patient's history) through automation. If they're trying to undermine the process of creating the patient record, they're doing a disservice to the patient and to future healthcare providers of that patient.
- Nupur 10y agoHi, I am the co-founder of RigPlenish. Charting is only part of the paperwork involved. In addition, for charting we cannot compromise on the required information in order to get NEMSIS compliance. If you have more questions, happy to chat over email (nupur@rigplenish.com).
- probe 10y agoWhat's really interesting about this batch (and previous two) is this new blend between digital and physical. In the decade of the 2000s, the big companies that succeeded were all software/web in nature - with Google, FB, LNKD, TWTR, etc. you engaged with them solely on the screen and their revenues derived primarily from advertising and taking advantage of your eyeballs. If you look at the new monopolies in the first half of this decade (ex. Uber, Airbnb, Palantir, etc.) they're bleeding into the physical world and providing value in a very tangible way (ex. literally moving you from point A to point B). It's no surprise that many of them are staying private for even longer; physical problems require human engagement and it's just a harder problem that requires more attention. I believe a lot of startups, investors, and partners have subconsciously realized this and now see the potential that new technology has in impacting the physical world through digital portals and digital means. Expect this trend to continue.
- canonicalcoder 10y agoI think UtilityScore has a promising business model in offering free residential energy guidance that is supported by the promotion of energy efficient products. I've been hoping to see something like this for a while. I'd like to share that the Department of Energy supports a suite of open source software tools that are useful in making these kinds of whole building energy predictions. Some of this may be applicable to the UtilityScore team in making more detailed and accurate predictions. At the core is a simulation engine called EnergyPlus https://energyplus.net https://energyplus.net, and around that DOE also supports a middleware called OpenStudio https://www.openstudio.net https://www.openstudio.net that aids in assembling detailed and complex energy models more easily. For commercial buildings there is an Asset Score tool very similar to UtilityScore built on top of OpenStudio. The asset score tool even has a web API. This tool stops short of making specific product recommendations as that is outside the domain of a publicly funded project like this. EnergyPlus accessed through the conveniences of OpenStudio is becoming a shared platform for many different use cases beyond asset scoring. The large HVAC manufactures are using these tools as the foundation for their next generation equipment sizing tools, energy audit tools are leveraging OpenStudio for simulation http://www.simuwatt.com http://www.simuwatt.com, utilities are beginning to coalesce around the platform for quantifying utility incentives http://aceee.org/files/proceedings/2014/data/papers/5-603.pdf http://aceee.org/files/proceedings/2014/data/papers/5-603.pd..., and the state of California embedded this framework into the commercial energy code known as Title 24 http://bees.archenergy.com/software.html http://bees.archenergy.com/software.html. Full disclosure I am a National Renewable Energy Lab employee and principle developer of OpenStudio with a vested interest in the platform. That said I think there could be some synergy in leveraging OpenStudio models in the UtilityScore process. Our charter is to support commercial tools exactly like this while not directly competing.