YCombinator News on LinkedIn

Which Y Combinator companies are actually worth the most in 2026? This ranking of the top 20 never-acquired YC companies (public valuations at latest close, private at last round) is a masterclass in long-term startup value creation. Here’s the leaderboard as of August 20, 2026: 🔺Stripe (S09) - $159B 🔺Airbnb (W09) - $109.1B 🔺DoorDash (S13) - $96.4B 🔺Coinbase (S12) - $45.5B 🔺Scale AI (S16) - $29B 🔺Reddit (S05) - $28.9B …and the rest of the top 20 includes high-flyers like Kalshi ($22B), Whatnot ($20B), Deel ($17.3B), Rippling ($16.8B), Groww, Faire, Instacart, Meesho, Gusto, Replit, Flock Safety, Razorpay, Dropbox, and GitLab. Interesting insights 1.) Stripe’s $159B valuation is in a league of its own nearly 50% higher than Airbnb. Infrastructure companies that become essential rails tend to compound for decades. 2.) Newer batches are punching above their weight: Kalshi (W19) and Whatnot (W20) have already cracked the top 10, showing that category-defining products can scale extremely fast. 3.) AI is firmly in the elite tier with Scale AI at #5, while fintech, marketplaces, and crypto continue to dominate the upper ranks. 4.) Several of these companies (Airbnb, DoorDash, Coinbase, Reddit, Instacart, Dropbox, GitLab) went public and still sit among the most valuable YC alumni ever. Y Combinator’s real power isn’t just helping companies get started it’s creating platforms that become industry standards. Which company on this list surprises you the most? Or which YC company do you think will crack the top 5 next? Drop your thoughts below 👇 #YCombinator #YCStartups #StartupValuations #VentureCapital #TechUnicorns #Stripe #Airbnb #DoorDash #ScaleAI #StartupSuccess #Fintech #AIStartups

YC did not rank us in the Top 10 We got the Y Combinator's response to our application, and it was'nt what we wanted. But it was something we had expected. Now when I look at our application, maybe we did not standout in the crowd. We do not have any traction and no real users for the product yet. Does this mean that our idea is not worth investing in? Absolutely not! We have seen the plight of business owners and the market is a vast ocean. We did not make it in the Top 10 because we were not ready. This made us draw our timeline: 1) Launch the working product by 30 Sept 2026 2) Onboard the first customer by 15 Oct 2026 3) Launch marketing campaigns by 31st Oct 2026 4) Reach first 20 customers by 30 Nov 2026 YC, hold fast for we will be in your next batch of 2027! #Ycombinator #YC #Startup #SAAS #AI

Thrilled to announce that I've been selected to contribute to DeepSWE, a long-horizon software engineering benchmark built by Datacurve (Y Combinator-backed) via their shipd.ai platform, used to evaluate how well frontier AI coding agents actually perform on real, complex engineering tasks. I got connected to this through Parsa Nasirian, who reached out after seeing my work on the is-a.dev open-source registry — really grateful for the introduction. It's a paid opportunity — contributors are compensated for accepted engineering challenges that help test the limits of leading AI models. Huge shoutout to Claude Code :), looking forward to contributing. #AI #SoftwareEngineering #OpenSource #DeepSWE #YCombinator #TechCareers

Last week I ran a mock Y Combinator interview with two co-founders. They did really well until I asked a specific quantitative question. For context, these guys launched recently, they don’t have much data to work with. Instead of saying  "We don't know yet. We launched 40 days ago, here's what we're seeing anecdotally, we don't have enough data to substantiate it.", they bs’ed their way to an answer that I rated as a B minus. The problem with bs answers is that investors are unlikely to tell you your answer wasn't satisfactory. They'll usually nod and move on. The fix is simple. When you don’t know the answer, say so. You’re not supposed to have all the answers. Admitting to it builds much better credibility than trying to cover it up with a weak response. They took the feedback on board. Ran a few more mock interviews and got into YC. I wrote them a check. #founder #entrepreneur #startup #venturecapital #vc #ycombinator

And then there’s AfterQuery A company that most people probably hadn’t heard of a few months ago is now being talked about as potentially one of Y Combinator's fastest-growing unicorns.' Think about what that means. YC has produced companies like Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash, Coinbase and OpenAI. And now we’re seeing startups reach extraordinary scale at a speed that would have been almost unthinkable a decade ago. Why? Because the cost of building software is collapsing. AI can write the code. AI can test the code. AI can research the market. AI can automate operations. AI can run workflows. A tiny team can now do what previously required dozens, sometimes hundreds of people. And this is happening at the same time GPT-6 Astra is turning computers themselves into an interface that AI can operate. AI isn't just making companies more productive. It's changing how quickly a company can be created. The next generation of unicorns may not look like the last generation. They may start with 2 people, a laptop, a few agents and an idea. The crazy part? We're probably still very early. #AI #Startups #YCombinator #Unicorns #Entrepreneurship #AIAgents #FutureOfWork

Sirdab has raised $10 million in Series A funding to build a logistics infrastructure layer for Saudi Arabia and the wider GCC. Founded in 2022 by Naif Alzahri نايف الظاهري and Abdulrahman Alnamlah, Sirdab is addressing a growing challenge for businesses operating in an expanding economy: accessing reliable logistics capacity without having to build and manage warehouses, transportation relationships and operational systems themselves. Its platform connects businesses with verified logistics providers while bringing warehousing, transportation, inventory, orders, billing and compliance into a single digital layer. The model is deliberately asset-light. Rather than building a massive network of owned warehouses and fleets, Sirdab connects existing logistics capacity and uses technology to coordinate it. The results so far are notable: 850+ businesses using the platform 120+ warehouses 60+ transportation providers 20x revenue growth since Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch Profitability achieved The next phase will add another layer: AI. Sirdab plans to develop AI capabilities that can match businesses with suitable logistics capacity and automate coordination between shippers, warehouses and carriers. The Series A was co-led by Elm and BECO Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, COTU Ventures and D Global Ventures. The opportunity extends beyond logistics software. As Saudi Arabia expands its e-commerce, industrial, trade and infrastructure ecosystems, businesses will need logistics networks that can become more flexible as they expand into new cities and markets. Sirdab's ambition is to provide that flexibility through a connected technology layer. Make logistics capacity easier to access. Make it easier to manage. Then make it intelligent. Read full story here: https://lnkd.in/du365AkX #StartupMuslim #Sirdab #SaudiArabia #Logistics #SupplyChain #AI #EnterpriseTech #StartupFunding #SaudiStartups #GCC #YCombinator #VentureCapital

The funding will support expansion across Saudi Arabia and the GCC and further development of the platform, including AI for matching businesses with available capacity. https://lnkd.in/dq77Xe-K Sirdab Elm Company BECO Capital Y Combinator COTU Ventures D Global Ventures LLC Naif Alzahri نايف الظاهري) Abdulrahman Alnamlah) Ahmed Moawad) Ammar Joharji Rami Mirza l EMBA YAZEED AL-RUMAIH Michael Seibel) COTU Ventures #Sirdab #Elm #BECOVCapital #YCombinator #COTUVentures #DGlobalVentures #Logistics #LogisticsTech #SupplyChain #AI #SaudiArabia #GCC #SaudiStartups #SeriesA #VentureCapital #DigitalTransformation #Tech #StartupFunding

Y Combinator didn't reject us! - 8-day-old idea - no product - both still part-time - application submitted at 4.40 am, 20min before the deadline - founder video filmed at 10 pm the previous night - demo scraped up in 1h, 2 hours before the deadline, after receiving feedback on our application at midnight to "just do it, anything is better than nothing" Though we also weren't accepted... Yet ;) We applied for the YC F26 batch with Early Decision. On the last day, we received an email saying the application was promising, but that we were being moved to the W27 batch. Not what we hoped for; we pushed ourselves to submit before the deadline because we really wanted a verdict on time. But a small win is still a win. We'll take it! We are soon submitting a big update to the YC portal, as a lot has happened since then. Help us make it even bigger by signing up on our waitlist at www.thesecondapp.com Much appreciated, Klara and Vid 🤠 #yc #ycombinator #f26 #startup #founders #buildinginpublic #stealth

Featured Impact Project: Spaceium Inc. (YC S24) – The Orbital Gas Station for Satellites Spaceium is a Y Combinator-backed space startup building automated orbital refueling stations for satellites. It has successfully tested a robotic actuator 70× more precise than any demonstrated in space, and is targeting first operational station deployment within two to three years . Founded in 2023, the company completed Y Combinator in 2024 and raised a $6.3 million seed round in 2025 . How it works: 🔧 0.003° actuator precision — 70× more precise than any robotic arm in space . ⛽ Stores 10–30 metric tons of fuel in orbit for up to 10 years . 🔄 Robotic refueling arm transfers fuel with sub-millimeter accuracy . 🚀 First demonstration: November 2025 (SpaceX Transporter-15) — actuator successful . Key impacts: 💰 $6.3M seed raised . 🚀 Y Combinator 2024 batch . 🛰 First operational station targeted within 2–3 years . 📡 Second mission planned for later in 2026 . Scale: 📍 U.S. with Canadian subsidiary . 🔧 Founded 2023 | CEO: Ashi Dissanayake . 🧪 Built and flew the most precise robotic actuator ever tested in orbit in just 5 months . 🌍 Targeting satellite constellations, orbital transfer vehicles, and deep-space missions . Why it matters: "Extending satellite life or redirecting a spacecraft to a new mission requires access to fuel in orbit — a capability that does not yet exist at commercial scale." — Spaceium is building the fuel depot infrastructure for the space economy. Store. Transfer. Refuel. 🔗 https://spaceium.com #Spaceium #OrbitalRefueling #SpaceInfrastructure #YCombinator #SatelliteServicing #InSpaceLogistics #FuelDepot #AvantImpactStories

🇸🇦 Saudi logistics startup Sirdab has raised $10M in Series A funding to expand across Saudi Arabia and the wider GCC. The round was co-led by PIF-backed digital solutions company Elm and existing investor BECO Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, COTU Ventures and D Global Ventures. Founded in 2022, Sirdab’s technology platform connects businesses with warehousing and transportation services while helping them manage inventory and orders across multiple locations. More than 850 businesses use the platform, which connects them with over 120 warehouses and 60 transportation providers. Sirdab also reached profitability after growing revenue 20x since graduating from Y Combinator’s Winter 2023 batch. The new funding will support regional expansion, logistics network growth and further development of AI tools for matching businesses with available capacity and coordinating shippers, warehouses and carriers. 🔗 Full story: https://buff.ly/dKSusRE #MENAStartupDigest #SaudiArabia #Sirdab #Elm #BECOCapital #YCombinator #Logistics #SupplyChain #Startups #Funding #VentureCapital #GCC #MENA

Featured Impact Project: General Astronautics – Robots That Replace $130K/Hour Astronauts General Astronautics is a Y Combinator-backed space robotics startup building autonomous robotic systems for microgravity environments, automating laboratory workflows such as pipetting, sample preparation, and reagent mixing to enable scalable research and manufacturing in space without human crew support . NASA estimates astronaut labor at approximately $130,000 per hour on the ISS . The company automates that labor. How it works: 🧪 Robots perform pipetting, sample preparation, plate handling, and reagent mixing in microgravity . 🤖 Designed for continuous operation without human crew support . 🔄 Automates the repetitive, precise operations that form the backbone of scientific research and manufacturing in orbit . 🛰 Targets protein crystallization, biologics manufacturing, advanced materials, and semiconductors . Key impacts: 💰 $40M post-money valuation . 🚀 Y Combinator W2026 cohort — backed by Y Combinator and NVIDIA . 🧬 Enables biotech, pharma, materials, and semiconductor industries to leverage microgravity . ⚡ Part of NVIDIA's Inception Program . Scale: 📍 United States . 🔧 Founded 2025 . 🤝 Strategic investment from Planet Ventures . 👨‍🚀 Addresses the fundamental bottleneck of scarce, expensive human labor in orbit . Why it matters: "Microgravity environments fundamentally change what is possible in science and industry — proteins crystallize with greater purity, semiconductors form without gravity-induced defects." — General Astronautics unlocks scalable space-based R&D without astronauts . Automate. Scale. Industrialise. 🔗 https://generalastro.com #GeneralAstronautics #SpaceRobotics #Microgravity #AutonomousLab #YCombinator #NVIDIA #SpaceManufacturing #AvantImpactStories

The best ideas sound lame at first. Paul Graham wrote this in June. Answering a public remark that large wealth cannot be built without cheating, he replied with arithmetic rather than moral argument. MATH. Graham cites a founder who, asked about last month's growth, answered 93 percent. At that rate her net worth compounds at the same pace, and reaching a billion from two million takes roughly 9.45 months by his calculation. At a far more realistic 15 percent a month, five years compounds 4,384 times, turning ten thousand a month into about 44 million a month. So the only questions left, he argues, are growth rate and how long that growth holds. START. Where does the growth come from. Graham writes that it comes from making something so good that people tell their friends about it. And the very best startup ideas sound so lame at first that you would reject them if you were consciously looking for startup ideas. Which is why he tells young founders to stop hunting for ideas and build something they themselves want. ENGINE. The most important sentence in the piece is this one. If you want to start a successful startup, the key is not exploitation but empathy. Wealth comes from understanding some group of users so well that you can make exactly what they want. That is Graham's argument. What remains for us is the growth question. In an early company, monthly growth and how many months it has held tell you more than cumulative revenue. And reflexively filtering out items that sound lame filters out the good ones too, so look first at the depth of user understanding. We hold one caution alongside it. As Graham states, Y Combinator has funded about 6,500 companies since 2005 and roughly 30 have produced billionaires. That is under 0.5 percent. Using growth rate as a standard is right. Reading the answer as a guarantee of success is not. Check whether it sounds lame first. #Andone #GlobalACSignals #PaulGraham #YCombinator #Startups #GrowthRate #StartupIdeas #Accelerator #VentureCapital #FounderInsights

AfterQuery Hits $3.2B Valuation as Y Combinator's Fastest Unicorn 📌 AI training-data startup AfterQuery has reached a $3.2 billion valuation, marking the fastest transition to unicorn status in Y Combinator history. The company specializes in encoding professional reasoning for advanced model training. 🔗 Read more: https://lnkd.in/dr-GzSZA #afterquery #ycombinator #aitrainingdata #unicornstatus

Munich-based startup Zeit AI (YC S24) has raised €4.3 million ($5 million) in a new funding round. The funding round includes several well-known investors. These include Y Combinator, the University of Oxford’s Seed Fund, the Sequoia Capital Scout Fund, ACE Ventures, and Hasso Plattner VC, the investment fund of SAP founder Hasso Plattner. The round also received investment from several prominent angel investors. They include former German Finance Minister Christian Lindner, World Cup winner Mario Götze, Meta board member Charlie Songhurst, Martin Schoeller of Schoeller Group, and Helsing CTO Dr. Robert Fink. Leopold von Waldthausen | Marvin Bornstein News Link: https://lnkd.in/dsesaWx8 #ZeitAI #funding #YCombinator #Munich #Technology #BusinessNews

🚀 Learning from YC Startup School Today, I learned how founders think, build, and validate ideas at Y Combinator. Big takeaway: Stop overthinking. Start building. Day 1 of learning & building. 🔥 #Startup #YCombinator #BuildInPublic #Entrepreneurship

And for my next trick: YCombinator Coach is not so secretly trying to find a way to fund their shitty start-ups with public money... They just launched a fund with Robinhood that has enough legal distance that they can lie and say they aren't involved..but the founder of Y combinator is the fund manager... But doing all of that isn't illegal..itself but I am still digging I'm sure I'm going to find more crimes by someone... What smells gross and I am sure there is something there is that the whole pipeline seems to be build by Sohail Prasad..He started Forge to provide liquidity private shareholders...he then started Destiny Tech 100 to allow retail funds to get in the bank accounts of these executives and insiders in Silicon Valley.. They split this pipeline into two tranches...late stage has had RVI, DXYZ, VCX and ARKVX as sources of funds for these... Prasad PAID open AI $150 Million of retial investor money on the 13th of August in what we believe was hush money payments for people that knew Open AI planned everything.. there is a window so narrow for this to be legal that Tinkerbell would need to go on a diet and still might not fit..FINRA But that was one way the YC network pipeline worked for the late stage to do some illegal shit... What else were they up to that day? Well I'm glad you asked They started a Robinhood fund that is managed by the guy that founded YC spacifically to invest in early stage YC companies...that's right on August 13th while part of the YC funny money network was stealing from retail investors they were literally setting up an even better suckers market... You can't make up this greed...But again Sam Altman was part of their first batch..and guess who was running things when Prasad came through? Sam himself and they have kept that going... This is very personal for me because I know what these people were intending with AI...I have been studing AI for 30 years I know what the different motivation trees are... when peoiple say there is a 25% chance humanity doesn't survive..you have to know that the goal for them is not humanity flourishing...I wouldn't do anything that had a 25% chance of killing my children..I don't care what the reward is.. But for some people a 25% chance you destroy the world that is an easy risk to take if the other 75% means they rule it... They thought the first to get to "AGI" would rule the world.. thats why the Pike Data Center is so important...it was to be the largest ever and provide the compute Sam sold them on that they needed for control... I love my children and feared fucks like this and Palantir Technologies for so long..I grinded hours and hours at night like a mad man because I couldn't let you dickheads win....Humanity wins shit bags and I'm gonna destroy you all. 😀

Conveo has raised $50 million in Series A funding to expand in the United States and develop its platform into a broader consumer intelligence infrastructure for enterprises. https://lnkd.in/dArfUuD7 Conveo DST Global Balderton Capital.k Visionaries 6 Degrees Capital Y Combinator Dieter De Mesmaeker Hendrik Van Hove Niels Schillewaert Tom Husson Kerry Benson David Savelson Wouter Volckaert Hilmar Eggertsson Lucas Stoops Thibault D'hondt #Conveo #DSTGlobal #BaldertonCapital #Visionaries #6DegreesCapital #YCombinator #AI #ConsumerIntelligence #MarketResearch #ConsumerInsights #EnterpriseAI #ArtificialIntelligence #SeriesA #VentureCapital #MarketingTechnology #Growth #StartupFunding

Conveo just raised $50 million to rethink how companies understand their customers. 🎥🤖 AI-powered consumer research startup Conveo has raised $50 million in Series A funding, led by DST Global Partners, with participation from Balderton Capital, Visionaries, 6 Degrees Capital and Y Combinator. The round takes Conveo’s total funding to $55.8 million. Its core product is an AI research interviewer that conducts in-depth video conversations with thousands of real consumers in days — a process that traditionally takes market researchers months through focus groups and surveys. Conveo then turns those conversations into a continuously updated consumer intelligence layer that brand teams can search using plain language to inform: 🔹 Product decisions 🔹 Marketing strategy 🔹 Brand positioning 🔹 Consumer insights Its newer product, StoryLines, takes this a step further by making consumer research always-on rather than a one-time study. Founded in 2024 by Dieter De Mesmaeker and Hendrik Van Hove after graduating from Y Combinator, Conveo says it is now used by 400+ enterprises, including 50+ Fortune 500 brands. Headquartered in New York with engineering in Belgium, the company plans to use the fresh capital to expand further across the US. The future of consumer research may not be more surveys. It may be AI that can actually talk to thousands of customers. #Conveo #ArtificialIntelligence #ConsumerResearch #MarketResearch #AI #GenerativeAI #MarTech #EnterpriseAI #Startup #VentureCapital #YCombinator #Entrepolish

A rather interesting story came back across my desk this week. Earlier this year, I was approached by AfterQuery, a San Francisco AI research company, to talk about something I've become increasingly fascinated by myself: How people actually use AI to get real work done. Not simply writing a prompt and accepting the answer. How we research, make judgement calls, move between different pieces of software, reject things that don't work, change direction, solve problems and ultimately turn AI output into a real-world result. I had a fascinating conversation with the AfterQuery team about the way I use AI within Ryotech and across the different businesses and systems we're building. At the time, AfterQuery was still relatively unknown to me. This week, Forbes reported that the company has reached a $3.2 billion valuation, making it reportedly the fastest Y Combinator startup ever to reach unicorn status. Quite a lot can happen in six months! What's particularly interesting to me isn't really the valuation, though. It's why this area has become so valuable. There is an enormous difference between giving an AI information and teaching it how experienced people actually reason, decide and work. That's something AfterQuery is tackling at the frontier-model level, and interestingly it's a principle we've increasingly found ourselves exploring from a very different direction at Ryotech... particularly while developing our own AI-assisted research, prospecting and business systems. Information is everywhere. Good judgement isn't. Congratulations to Brian Hendricks and everyone at AfterQuery. It's been fascinating watching what has happened since that first conversation, and I suspect our paths may cross again as this space continues to develop. Forbes: https://lnkd.in/eGiHiBS6 AfterQuery: https://lnkd.in/eSpgfs3U #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #AfterQuery #YCombinator #SmallBusiness #Innovation

🤖 Zeit AI Raises €5M to Build Sovereign AI Infrastructure for Businesses What if mid-sized industrial companies could get Palantir-style data intelligence without the cost, complexity and data sovereignty concerns? Zeit AI (YC S24) is building AI infrastructure to make that possible. Munich-based Zeit AI, founded by Leopold von Waldthausen and Marvin Bornstein, both former Palantir employees, has raised €5 million in seed funding backed by Y Combinator, Oxford Seed Fund, SEQUOIA CAPITAL SCOUT FUND II, L.L.C., ACE Ventures and HPVC. The round also includes high-profile angel investors such as former German finance minister Christian Lindner, 2014 World Cup winner Mario Götze, Meta board member Charlie Songhurst and Helsing CTO Dr. Robert Fink. The startup's ZeitMind platform acts as an autonomous AI data analyst, cleaning and integrating raw business data before generating reports, alerts, inventory optimisation and procurement insights. Zeit AI says its outputs are fully auditable, with every number traceable back to the SQL and database code that generated it. The company is already working with around 30 enterprise clients across Europe, the US and Brazil. With its team growing from six to 12 employees in 2026, the new funding will support further hiring and international expansion, including a planned London office. Read More - https://lnkd.in/dtUibsPm #WorkNationBuzz #ZeitAI #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #EnterpriseAI #SovereignAI #DataAnalytics #AgenticAI #GermanStartups #EuropeanStartups #StartupFunding #YCombinator #Palantir