Last year, CollegeBudget launched with the goal of bringing a variation on the Groupon discount and group buying model to the campus. The goal being to help college students at colleges and universities across the country fight high costs by offering discounts on everything from textbooks to student loans.
Today, CollegeBudget is moving more aggressively into local offers, particularly around food. For hungry, cash-strapped students, food discounts can be extremely appealing, especially when one of the alternatives is the school’s cafeteria. That’s why the startup is today announcing that it is acquiring Y Combinator-backed Munch On Me, a food discovery portal that connects people with great good at affordable prices from local restaurants. → Read More
AnyVivo, a startup that launched this spring out of Y Combinator’s Winter 2012 program, has a pretty big mission: It wants to be the e-commerce hub for all living things. You might think that Amazon sells everything, and you’re almost right — but AnyVivo wants to pick up exactly where it leaves off, at pets and plants.
The company is starting by selling jellyfish — and things are going so swimmingly (ha) that AnyVivo has opted to turn down its offers for venture capital funding and just keep growing on its own. TechCrunch TV headed on over to AnyVivo’s headquarters to get an inside look at its 6,000 square foot warehouse and interview its co-founders, Alex Andon and Cameron Urban. → Read More
Online payment platform WePay just announced that it has raised $10 million in a new financing round. This round was led by Ignition Partners. Two of the company’s existing investors, Highland Capital Partners and August Capital also participated in this round. WePay, which bills itself as the “anti-PayPal,” is a Y Combinator alumni and was founded in 2008. The company raised a total of $9.15 million in two previous rounds over the last two years. In today’s announcement, WePay notes that this is a growth round and is meant to allow it to scale its technology and workforce. → Read More
I would normally rather have a root canal instead of write about the issue of women in technology. I just find most essays on this really tedious and obvious. (Sorry Alexia.)
But I do want to point one thing out. When I went to my first Y Combinator Demo Day three years ago, there was one woman. At this week’s Demo Day, there were six companies with one or all female founders among the 66 startups in the class.
I’m going to keep this post simple. No complaining. Less navel gazing. Just more role models. So here are the women of Y Combinator and they are awesome: → Read More
Yesterday, Y Combinator double alum and video sharing app Socialcam debuted its new and improved wares at Demo Day. Today, the startup is following up with the official announcement of Socialcam 4.0 — the biggest release for the video sharing tool since it released its filters — that brings themes and soundtracks to the so-called “Instagram for video.”
Since Socialcam spun out of Justin.tv last year, it’s been on a mission to bring video creation to the mainstream. As Eric wrote in January, the app passed 3 million downloads in December, and had begun sending 3 million notifications per day. The reason for this was largely its sharing feed and filter that are now so often associated with Instagram and Hipstagram. → Read More
If you want a better way to shop, hire, share video, or stay in touch with your significant other, you’ll love the companies that presented at today’s Y Combinator Demo Day session four. Many are already gaining traction, and investors are vying to get in before their valuations increase.
Check out why Y Combinator companies are all about mobile, as well as our coverage of the first, second, and third sessions. Here’s a look at the seven companies that strutted their stuff in session four: → Read More
We’re covering Y Combinator’s Winter 2012 Demo Day at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, where 66 startups are presenting the applications they’ve built over the past three months in YC’s Silicon Valley incubator. The startups are presenting over five sessions; you can find our coverage of the first one right here. This is the second batch of YC startups who presented on the record today. → Read More
We’re here live at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., where top early-stage fund Y Combinator is kicking off its biggest day yet — 66 companies are in this class, and all of them are presenting. Almost all of them are in the process of raising money.
The day is divided up into five sessions. We’ll be doing a post on each session. Here’s the first set. → Read More
If you were to stop for a moment and consider what your perfect deals site would be, chances are it doesn’t look a whole lot like any of the big names currently operating in the space. When it comes down to it, we all have our own individual preferences when it comes to products, activities, and experiences. So, the lowest common denominator would be a platform that routinely serves us great deals on the things we actually enjoy. As simple as that may sound, there are few deals players that do it well. Dealupa, a startup that’s part of Y Combinator’s current winter batch, is launching today with what it hopes is a solution to deal disappointment, aka deal fatigue. → Read More
Say you’re sitting at your laptop, listening to music while responding to emails, writing code, or reading blogs. Then your phone rings, and the typical scramble ensues: You minimize your browser, maximize your music app, and search frantically for the pause button or volume control — all, hopefully, before you miss the call. Sound familiar? That’s a problem that Flutter, a startup in Y Combinator’s latest batch of companies, has solved.
Flutter is an app for Mac that lets you control the play and stop functions on Spotify or iTunes by simply waving at your computer. You can watch it in action in the video embedded above. That in itself is pretty nifty, but the really interesting thing is the company’s long-term vision, which goes well beyond the ability to start and stop a Rihanna song with a wave of your hand. Ultimately, Flutter co-founders Navneet Delal and Mehul Nariyawala tell me, Flutter wants to power the eyes of our devices — in the same way that Siri functions as the iPhone’s ears. → Read More
As everyone knows, multiplayer is better than single player, and as the geeks among us know, there’s a set of multiplayer games, like Minecraft and Urban Terror, that offer software that allows gamers to host their own servers. For games like Minecraft, running your own server means that you don’t have to be subject to the rules and regulations of other hosts — you get to invite all of your friends into your world to play, and you get to set the rules.
While this can make the game experience infinitely more fun, gamers have to rent their own servers for $70 a month, be their own sysadmin, and are thus subject to their system’s RAM and CPU constraints. In other words, for hardware novices, the process can get complicated. This is where Minefold enters into the picture. Minefold, a new Y Combinator startup launching today, wants to be a more consumer-focused Amazon EC2 for the multiplayer gaming world, offering on-demand game servers for a nominal monthly fee ($5). → Read More
We’ve heard a lot about photo-sharing apps over the last year or two, and although the launch of a new social photo app may result in eye-rolling by some, images are becoming an ever-more important medium for communication. As our lives, products, and communications become increasingly visual, content producers, app developers, and site owners alike all have to ramp up their services to meet that escalating demand. Of course, that’s easier said than done.
That’s why Chute, a new Y Combinator startup launching today, doesn’t just want to be another photo sharing or syncing app, it wants to the service every app developer and content producer uses to manage and enhance their photo capabilities. Chute is an Images-as-a-Service startup or, in other words, a cool API for photos. What does that mean? → Read More
Sometimes the genesis of a startup happens just like this: Guy buys iPhone. Guy breaks iPhone. Guy then pays Apple way too much to fix said phone, grumbling ensues. Guy breaks phone again. Roommate breaks phone. Then, a lightbulb goes off. This is what happened to A.J. Forsythe when he was a student at California Polytechnic State University. He and his friends broke their iPhones more than a few times, so he decided to teach himself how to fix it. Then, like any good entrepreneur, he turned that solution into a business. Forsythe started charging people at school $75 per fix, set up a few social media accounts to hawk his services, remodeled his room into a repair shop, and iCracked was born. → Read More
Smartphones have a lot of cool technology built in, from high-res touchscreens to gestural command features, like shaking, rocking, or rolling, and motion sensing via accelerometers. Just as mobile computing is revolutionizing the way we communicate and interact with the world, unsurprisingly smartphone technology is also having its way with gaming.
Since we’re rarely without our mobile devices today, mobile gaming (especially social-mobile) is becoming increasingly popular — but thanks to the wizardry of smartphone tech — a number of intrepid souls are turning back to explore the interactive possibilities between our mobile devices and our hardware — our desktops, etc. The most entertaining example of which would be the ability to transform our smartphones into game controllers. → Read More
Back in August, Y Combinator held its summer session demo day, introducing the world to 60 new companies in one of its strongest batches to date. One of these companies, DoubleRecall launched as a platform that enables companies to roll out digital campaigns that actually succeed in prompting users “to read an ad,” rather than scoff and click elsewhere. → Read More
Inherently, we like doing things in groups, as it makes our experiences more social. It’s not about what we’re doing so much as who we’re doing it with that makes our experiences enjoyable. Group messaging took off two years ago, overrunning SXSW, as a better way to keep groups of people engaged; Kickstarter has grown like a week thanks to the power of the crowd lending legs to fledgling projects that need quick capital to get off the ground.
A new startup launching today called Crowdtilt is taking a page out of Kickstarter’s book, riffing on “crowdfunding,” but instead choosing to call itself “groupfunding” or a “Kickstarter for groups of friends.” → Read More
If you’ve ever set up an automatic ‘Bill Pay’ feature on your bank account to pay off your utility and cable bills, then you’ve taken advantage of a nifty feature called an ‘interbank transfer’, also known as an ‘Automated Clearing House’ payment. Once they’re set up, they tend to be very convenient — the amount of the bill is automatically deducted from your account, saving you the hassle of having to write yet another check (or fill out another online form) each month. Merchants benefit from this system as well, because their fees are significantly lower than those that are charged by the credit card companies.
Thing is, this feature is typically only available for paying bills from big companies — it’s rare to see a smaller online merchant that’s offering these automatic transfers, because the process for them to set it up is complicated and costly. Until now. Y Combinator-backed startup GoCardless is launching today as a UK-based service that allows smaller merchants to easily set up interbank transfers for customers. → Read More
Incubators are playing an increasingly vital role in acquiring meaningful investment for first-time entrepreneurs. TechCrunch reported that elite accelerators like Y Combinator receive on average one application every minute, and AngelPad reminds its participants that it is many times more selective than the Harvard Business School.
Incubators ask for a 2 to 10 percent stake in your company, a sum that could alternatively be used to attract a junior co-founder or provide meaningful ownership to the first few engineers you enlist. In return, incubators offer intensive coaching, networking with other founders, and warm introductions to likely investors. Incubators give first-time entrepreneurs and international teams alike a crucial link to Silicon Valley. → Read More
At this point quite a few internet companies have protested H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in creative ways. Held by many to be the worst thing to ever happen to the Internet if it passes, SOPA would makes it really easy for copyright holders to force sites offline that they think are offending, among other things.\
While the judiciary vote has been delayed until next year, the list revealing the companies who support the act was released yesterday, and many startups, such as Reddit, have begun to drill down into boycotts of individual companies like domain provider GoDaddy.
→ Read More
Last week, Erick wrote about the dramatic increase in startups and early-stage businesses we’ve been seeing over the last few years, likening the phenomenon to the Cambrian Explosion. In these fertile times for startups, naturally, there’s plenty of funding to be had: In the last year, according to CrunchBase, there were more than 1,100 seed/angel funding rounds, up from 855 in 2008.
There are fewer barriers to startup creation now than ever before, and as businesses pop up left and right, so have the incubators and accelerators that provide these companies with the early fuel they need to build their products. Y Combinator, one of the more well-known startup incubators in the world, is now receiving over one application every minute, for example, and recently expanded the size of its classes to keep pace with demand. → Read More
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