Meet the YC Winter 2024 Batch

Today we’re kicking off Y Combinator’s 38th Demo Day, celebrating the incredible batch that is W24. This batch marks the completion of my first year as President of YC — and what an amazing year it’s been.

During the last batch we moved Y Combinator into a beautiful office in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood. This batch we took over a massive building next door, too — more than tripling the space available to us.

But this expansion has meant so much more than just additional square footage. What we call “the office” has very quickly become more of a campus, and the energy of this campus is unlike anything else in startup land. Hundreds of YC founders are coming through these doors each and every day for office hours, meetups, and just to be among their fellow builders. As Jared Friedman put it recently: YC’s new home is the most concentrated focal point the early stage startup ecosystem has ever seen.

Good energy begets good energy, and the energy from our office is already spilling out in great ways to the neighborhood around it. Many of the founders who came to SF for the batch have decided to make SF home — for themselves, and for their companies. We are turning San Francisco’s doom loop into a boom loop.

A new office also means new traditions. Just one example of a tradition that began this batch: Bookface Launch Live.

Imagine a room where the best builders in the world are presenting the fruits of their labor, often weeks or months before they show it anywhere else. A room full of builders showing each other what is possible, peering into the future together, and collaborating to get there even faster. That’s Bookface Launch Live.

As YC’s office footprint has grown, so has YC as an organization. YC’s roster of Group Partners is stronger than it has ever been, and we expect that roster to only grow. These are the people hand-picking the companies YC invests in, working with them throughout the batch, and supporting these founders for the life of their company.

As he shared a few weeks ago, Michael Seibel is returning to his original role as a YC Group Partner — a move that lets him focus more of his time on the job he likes most: mentoring founders. The list of what Michael has accomplished for YC is miles long; if something is an important part of YC, he likely played a key part in it. We all thank you, Michael, and we’re honored that we get to continue working with you for the next many years.

This batch we also welcomed Pete Koomen (founder of Optimizely, an absolute juggernaut of a startup from W10) as a Group Partner, as well as Tyler Bosmeny (Clever, S12) and Nate Smith (Lever, S12) as Visiting Group Partners. Expect more announcements here soon.

260 companies joined YC for W24, as selected from over 27,000 applications. With an acceptance rate under 1%, this was one of the most selective cohorts in YC history.

Many of the companies in this batch — at least 50% — are building around AI in one form or another. Why so much AI for YC? It’s simple: YC invests in the best founders in the world, and many of today’s best founders are choosing to build in AI. These founders are constantly discovering new, incredible, practical uses for AI and LLMs that solve problems across industries. We can now do things with software that weren’t possible just a year or two ago — and we’re still in the very early days! AI is a catalyst unlike anything we’ve seen in a long, long time; what the Internet did for startups in the 90s, and smartphones did in the 2000s, AI is doing once again.

With this batch, the YC community is now made up of more than 4,500 startups and 11,000 founders.

W24 Verticals:

65% in B2B SaaS / Enterprise
11% in Consumer
10% in Healthcare
8% in Fintech
4% in Industrials
1% in Govtech
1% in Edtech

W24 Demographics*:

Asian: 25%
Black: 4%
Hispanic: 2%
Middle Eastern: 5%
Multi-racial: 10%
South Asian: 18%
White: 36%

(* self-reported and opt-in; not all founders reported demographics)

Additionally, 21% of the W24 companies have a woman founder and 11% of the founders are women.

We’re in this crazy moment in history where there’s a breakthrough in AI, tech, and software almost every single week, and so much of that is happening at YC. I wake up every day excited to see how YC founders have moved the world forward.

Congrats to the YC W24 batch!

Meet the YC Winter 2024 Batch

Author

Garry Tan