Y Combinator’s Paul Graham revealed a bunch of personnel news in a just-published blog post.
Let’s see if I’ve got everything: The incubator has added one full-time partner (Wufoo’s Kevin Hale) and four part-time partners (Socialcam’s Michel Seibel, Hipmunk’s Steve Huffman, imeem and App.net’s Dalton Caldwell and Groupon’s Andrew Mason). Current partner Harj Taggar, meanwhile, is leaving “to… → Read More
Ready for a sky full of robo-planes?
Airware, a company that’s building the brains and guts for commercial unmanned drones, is announcing this morning that they’ve raised a big ol’ $10.7M Series A.
The round is led by Andreessen Horowitz, and backed by Google Ventures. As part of the round, Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon will be joining Airware’s board. → Read More
The price of airfare is an ongoing point of frustration for travelers, especially considering that it feels like airlines find every conceivable opportunity to shake you down for a few more bucks. Many startups and businesses have come and gone trying to find a way to give leisure travelers access to cheaper airfare, as airlines just keep shutting them down. The reason? Airlines make more money… → Read More
In a startup’s never-ending battle for new users, data is king. When the decision to put that shiny signup button down here vs. up there can mean the difference between 40% of new visitors signing up instead of 20%, good data analysis can be what puts food on the table.
YC-backed analytics service Heap wants to make analytics better. They want to help you to code less, but grow more. → Read More
“This is way better.” That was the prevailing sentiment at today’s Y Combinator Demo Day where 47 fresh startups strutted their stuff for investors. Compared to the 65 demos a year ago and tedious 75 in August, investors told me this tighter Demo Day was more manageable, the quality of startups was higher, and it felt like the YC of old that earned the reputation as tech’s premier incubator. → Read More
Y Combinator was tougher to get into than ever this season, and the quality showed on stage. 33 startups presented on the record at the incubator’s Winter 2013 Demo Day today. Picking the most promising ones was no easy task. But after a team huddle and taking input from VCs and founders, TechCrunch chose seven startups that could disrupt big businesses and make the world a better place to live. → Read More
Y Combinator Demo Day, where 47 startups are taking the stage to pitch investors and press, continues to roll along. Here are short descriptions of the second group of presenting companies (the descriptions in the headlines come from the companies themselves).
As we mentioned earlier, it’s a smaller batch of startups this time around, and since many of them are presenting on an off-the-record… → Read More
Before the pitches kicked off at today’s Y Combinator Demo Day, partner Paul Graham said the incubator was stricter than ever when selecting the current batch — there are 47 companies demonstrating today, compared to 75 in the last session.
“There are hardly any startups in this batch that are bad,” Graham said.
For that reason, he claimed that it will be just as hard for investors at this… → Read More
Prizeo is a startup aiming to channel celebrities’ social media influence into funding for charity.
Co-founders Bryan Baum and Leo Seigal are familiar with the fundraising world, having founded the Aloysius Society, a student philanthropy organization, while at Oxford. (That’s also where they met their co-founder and CTO Andrej Pancik.) They say the group raised more than $1 million at its… → Read More
The Humble Bundles have been an amazing deal for gamers. Today, the company behind the bundles announced that they would introduce a new weekly sale, in addition to the usual bundles that happen every month or so. Everything else remains the same — pay what you want to get DRM-free downloads of indie games that work on Windows, Mac and Linux. A small customizable part of every sale goes to two… → Read More
Y Combinator-backed Kamcord got off to a strong start last year — it locked up a hefty seed round which Chinese incubator InnovationWorks just recently added to — and now co-founder/CEO Matt Zitzmann says the team has its sights set on hitting some lofty usage goals.
For the uninitiated, Kamcord is an SDK for iOS that allows mobile game developers using a handful of popular game engines… → Read More
CircuitLab is coming up on its one year anniversary, and the startup (now part of Y Combinator’s winter 2013 cohort) now boasts 70,000 monthly active users, who run an average of one circuit simulation every six seconds. The phenomenal traction for the electrical-engineering-focused startup has a lot to do with the team offering up a tool that’s both free and particularly well-suited to… → Read More
Lawdingo, a startup that connects users with lawyers for online consultations (sometimes instantly), is announcing that it’s part of the current class of startups at Y Combinator.
I last wrote about Lawdingo in November. You can browse lawyers on the site based on their expertise and location, and if you find one you like, you can schedule an appointment or in some cases hit the “talk now”… → Read More
You know the drill, you order something from your favorite site and you can’t wait to get the package. Like a blogger normal person, you go to work and hope that the package is there when you get home. That hope slowly turns into worry as you picture your valuable freight sitting outside of your home, while people walk by it and wonder what it is. There are a few companies providing… → Read More
Y Combinator founder Paul Graham just published a blog post suggesting a new way to handle handshake deals, i.e. verbal commitments for investments and other transactions.
That kind of commitment can be a necessary prelude to a more formal agreement. Graham writes: “Things can happen fast in the startup world … so both investors and founders need a way to reserve space in a transaction.”… → Read More
Sure, socially-powered recommendations or good old-fashioned serendipity can be useful tools for discovery, but, when it comes to deciding where you’re going to take the family on vacation, you’re probably not going to just throw a dart at a dartboard and wing it. You’re probably going to spend some time researching and try to make an informed, democratic decision.
If that’s the case, would you… → Read More
For small businesses, buying and managing health insurance is a “pain in the buns,” to quote my new favorite ad. Not only are its complicated terms, lack of transparency, slow quoting and on-boarding process and paper trail a pain in your buns, but health insurance can be a massive pain in your wallet, to boot. Hidden costs are everywhere.
Y Combinator-backed SimplyInsured is launching today… → Read More
What if you could actually grasp the sword you pick up in a video game, or if surgeons could feel their robots hit bone? That’s the promise of the Tactilous glove, which won this weekend’s Upverter + Y Combinator Hardware Hackathon. Watch as we demo the Frankenstein-meets-Nintendo contraption that lets you touch objects in virtual reality. → Read More
The business of holiday home rentals has been one of the most natural areas to migrate to the world of e-commerce — the ability to search for and view lots of properties makes it a significant improvement on whatever it was that people used to do in the past (magazines? vacation agencies? brochures?), and that has helped the online rentals industry to blow up. One area that hasn’t evolved very… → Read More
Toronto’s Upverter is a startup that’s poised to effect change that could reshape the landscape of entrepreneurship. That’s not something you can say about most of the businesses we cover on a daily basis, whether or not they have good ideas. But it’s definitely true of Upverter, the company that’s hoping to build a cloud-based hardware engineering platform that can match and overtake its… → Read More
For startups and small businesses, providing and managing benefits can be a huge headache. In the early stages, this responsibility generally falls into the hands of founders, who have to contact insurance brokers and manage the whole enrollment process themselves. It’s distracting and tedious, but it’s also a critical part of ensuring that employees are happy, healthy and productive.
After… → Read More
Sharing and keeping tabs on code is relatively simple for coders thanks to GitHub and the like, but developers aren’t the only folks who could benefit from services like that. Designers could also use a smarter way to manage their projects, and that’s exactly the sort of niche that San Francisco-based Pixelapse is aiming to fill.
The problem first really came to light when co-founder Min… → Read More
We all love the idea of being able to connect and work with people in our always-online day and age, but ironically, when it comes to document collaboration, a lot of the software designed to aid in that — WebEx, GoToMeeting and the rest — is actually more geared to presenting rather than actually letting people work together on things, in real time, or focused on documents within a particular… → Read More
The back office is an unglamorous but crucial part of any venture firm. At Y Combinator, which has grown its seed-stage fund and incubator quickly in recent years, it also has to move at the pace of a young startup.
The person who has made that happen is Kirsty Nathoo, a UK transplant with an accounting background. She joined a few years ago and has shepherded hundreds of companies from entry… → Read More
Y Combinator founder Paul Graham tweeted today that the accelerator’s 464 startup graduates (prior to its current batch) have raised an average of $3.18 million in funding each, which means YC’s companies have landed a total of just under $1.5 billion. → Read More
Tenthbit, the Y Combinator-backed mobile app studio behind the couples app Pair, is doubling down (literally) on its business ambitions: the company today is announcing that it has bought Cupple, a UK-based rival mobile app for two people only, and, to mark the change, has rebranded itself as Couple. → Read More
It’s never been easier for would-be inventors to take a harebrained concept and turn it into an actual, sellable product, but the process of getting those products to the masses could still use a little work. Sure, crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have helped laid the groundwork for a revolution in how these passionate folks sell, but the team at YC-backed Swish feel like there… → Read More
Back in August, we wrote about the launch of a startup non-profit organization called Watsi, which offers anyone and everyone the opportunity to fund “low-cost, high impact treatment” for those who lack access to necessary care. Again, considering the fact that there are more than one billion people who are unable to afford adequate medical services (or don’t have access to them), Watsi’s mission… → Read More
InstallMonetizer is an ad network for desktop software developers, a group that co-founder and CEO Vince Mundy says he once belonged to himself.
“We looked really really hard to find legitimate sources of income [from free downloads],” Mundy said. “We found that there were other developers facing the exact same problem, so we created InstallMonetizer.” → Read More
CryptoSeal, a Y-Combinator company from the summer class of 2011, has launched its VPN as a service to help companies protect all that back-end administrative information from intrusions. → Read More
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