Recently, TechCrunch covered Y Combinator’s (YC) Winter 2019 Demo Day, giving the world a glimpse into the companies launching from the world’s top incubator for startups. It’s the largest batch of startups ever launching at this Mountain View-based incubator started in 2005. YC-incubated companies include Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, Reddit and Instacart, with a combined valuation of all YC companies hovering over $100B. On reading TechCrunch’s analysis of the most recent batch, I found a vast array of interesting startups around spaces such as healthcare, enterprise SaaS, logistics, developer tools, Africa and Latin America-focused solutions, college hiring in India and cryptocurrency trading.
Out of the 173+ startups from the YC’s latest batch, these are my favorite picks, in no particular order:
Jetpack Aviation: Jetpack Aviation is building a flying motorcycle called the Speeder. It almost seemed like an April Fool’s joke, but it’s real. Think transporting paramedics or injured citizens, extracting personnel, or time-sensitive cargo. Or Batman. Speeder can be piloted 👨🏽✈️ or flown autonomously 🤖. The Speeder is set to come in two versions — recreational and military.
Glide: Glide can create a mobile app from a Google Sheet. There are countless spreadsheets waiting to be turned into apps — think expenses, travel budgeting or interview shortlists. But building apps isn’t that easy. Glide turns a spreadsheet into an app in 5 mins, that you can then publish to the App Store or Play Store. Pretty cool.
Supernova: Along the lines of Glide, Supernova turns design assets from an app like Sketch into production-ready native code. While this isn’t a new idea, Supernova looks like a best of the breed solution. Designers seamlessly publishing apps seems like an inevitable and much needed future, and products like Supernova could usher us all into that era fast.
Shef: Shef delivers healthy home-cooked meals for cheap 👩🏻🍳. As someone who orders a lot of restaurant food, I find Shef an appealing idea. You can create meal plans for 4 meals/week at $30, which is pretty economical, considering one or two restaurant takeouts can easily run over $30. More ordering in and less guilt? Seems like a win-win.
Sunsama: Let’s face it —we‘ve all got todos at work. However, they’re often scattered across several different apps. There have been many attempts at unified todo lists in the last decade, but Sunsama looks promising with integrations like Slack, Asana, Trello, Github, and Jira. It also syncs tasks with your Google Calendar 📆.
Cherry: Job perks are a big deal for most people. I’ve heard stories of people accepting or rejecting job offers simply on the basis of perks. Cherry lets employees customize their job perks, so they could choose between a Spotify or Netflix membership, Postmates or Instacart credits, Lyft or Uber perks, Headspace or Calm subscription, and so on. Teams can add the Cherry bot to a Slack channel and it all seems pretty seamless from there.
Termius: Termius is an SSH client that works on desktop and mobile. This is a godsend for devs. I’m sure there are other services like this, but their iOS and Android apps look pretty good. Termius claims that over 24,000 engineers from teams like NASA, DuckDuckGo and Valve use the product. Even Woz, the developer of all developers, approves of it.
BensenAI: Bensen lets you order food from restaurants over voice via Alexa or Google Assistant 🗣. Wait a second, I couldn’t do that already? 🤔 Well, maybe, idk? But for a restaurant owner, Bensen’s setup process looks simple. All you do is upload your menu and Bensen takes care of the rest. This seems like something a restaurant owner could spend thousands on for a custom solution, but Bensen makes the whole experience plug-and-play, promising 2.5x more orders. Bensen suggests that voice commerce sales will hit $40B by 2022, and frankly, takeout ordering seems like a good beachhead into capturing that market.
Docucharm: Docucharm converts documents into structured data through machine learning. OCR for converting complex documents kind of sucks, while there are a gazillion documents waiting to be “understood” by AI. A product like this can make that process easier. Docucharm promises instant doc processing at “near-perfect accuracy”, eliminating manual data entry. This is a big problem worth solving.
AskData: AskData abstracts away interaction with databases for non-technical people into natural language via a chatbot. Databases sit at the bottom of pretty much every app, and a person or company that owns an app probably needs to interact with a database on a frequent basis. AskData turns that interaction into a convenient chat interface, which can lead to significant time and cost savings.
Trestle: Trestle is an intranet product to connect people at an organization. It aims to make a company more transparent and collaborative. Employees get their own profiles, and teams get their own pages, letting people quickly find what’s going on at their company. It’s sort of like LinkedIn, but just for your company. I covered a similar startup, Names & Faces, (another YC company I believe) in my last post. I’m really interested in this space, and I’m curious how these two products will play out.
Pershop: Pershop lets you choose your favorite brands and creates a personal clothing store for you 🛍. This is something I wanted but never thought of as a product, and now that I know it exists, I’m definitely curious. Although, a fun part of the shopping experience is discovering brands that you didn’t know about, most of the time I only order from brands I love. If the iOS app can add more value over time, for e.g. alert me of sales or use AI to suggest clothes I might like, I can see its sustained utility.
CouturMe: CouturMe makes custom dresses for women 👰🏼. Personalized apparel is a future we might definitely be headed towards, and starting with wedding dresses and formal wear to suit the unique curvature of every woman seems like a good idea.
CityFurnish: As our lives become more mobile, we’re often moving between cities. Dealing with disposing off your existing furniture becomes a huge hassle. CityFurnish lets you rent furniture in Indian cities at economical prices. They even have packages with essentials like bed frame, mattress and wardrobe. Now only if there were more choices based on our individual tastes, I’d be hooked to the idea of renting instead of buying furniture 🛏.
Allure Systems: Allure uses advanced computer vision to let online merchants customize models to wear a particular item of clothing 👗. Shoppers can benefit from more diverse and inclusive models while they shop — it might even increase sales. Imagine a day where you’re shopping online and the brand adapts its models for every item of clothing based altering attributes like skin color or size most relevant to you.
YSplit: YSplit lets you split payments among people more easily 💸. When I was an undergrad, my roommates and I had a shared debit card to pay for expenses like rent or groceries. YSplit addresses that need by creating virtual debit cards to simplify your shared recurring payments 💳. There are dozens of “split the bill” products out there today, but YSplit takes a novel approach that basically feels like a modern version of what my roommates did as undergrads.
Travelchime: If you’re into travelling, especially with friends, you have most definitely worked with a shared Google Doc to plan stuff out. Travelchime takes this particular use case and turns it into a product, letting you collaboratively plan travel on a doc 📝alongside a map powered by GMaps 🗺. This is an exciting idea and makes you think about other use cases in GDocs today that could be unbundled into their own products. I might give Travelchime a try for my next trip. 🏖
PadPiper: Besides the name having striking similarity to the infamous Pied Piper of HBO’s Silicon Valley 😂, PadPiper makes it easy for travelling professionals to find rentals. Let’s face it.. finding homes in new cities is still pretty arduous. PadPiper lets you find pads that are fully furnished from trusted landlords while facilitating rent payments, deposits and even housemate finding all through a dashboard. Currently only in SF, Mountain View and Toronto, but if they execute this well, this could be a game-changer for 1-month+ rentals around the world.
For general coverage of all the startups from YC’s latest batch, you can read TechCrunch’s analysis from Day 1 and Day 2.
All that said, Y Combinator has definitely gotten much bigger and probably more competitive. In fact, recently they announced that for the summer batch of 2019, they will hold interviews in Bangalore for founders based in India. This indicates just how much inbound volume YC must be getting from India. While I’m in New Delhi for the next few weeks, I hope to publish my thoughts on the Indian startup ecosystem in a post, so stay tuned.
For the meantime, with all the startup pitch craziness, it’s only fair that I leave you with a gem from HBO’s Silicon Valley.