We’re excited to share the Demo Day dates for 2026 so founders, investors, and our broader community can plan ahead.

2026 Demo Days

Winter 2026: Tuesday, March 24

Spring 2026: Tuesday, June 16

Summer 2026: Thursday, September 10

Fall 2026: Wednesday, December 2

If you’d like to start researching companies ahead of time, check out Launch YC and the Startup Directory. New startups launch there throughout the batch, so it’s worth checking in regularly.

Investors can review past investments and keep their contact info and bio up to date in the YC Investor Portal. More information about attending Demo Day can be found at ycombinator.com/demoday.

We look forward to seeing you in person next year!

Today, Meesho, one of India's leading online retail and merchant tools companies, goes public. It is the second YC company to be listed in India.

We met Meesho’s founders, Vidit and Sanjeev, three months into their journey. They applied to the Summer 2016 YC batch just after they launched their website. According to their application, they had 300 users at the time. As with most beginnings of great startups, they had a pretty clear idea of the problem they were solving, but hadn’t figured out the solution yet.

Their problem was this: very small merchants represented a large percentage of the total online retail market in India, and those merchants were being underserved by the existing tool sets. Shopify and Bigcommerce, the existing tool providers at the time, were too expensive and too heavyweight for their needs. The example they gave during their interview was that of a homemaker who had a side business selling sarees to her friends and neighbors. She did this primarily over WhatsApp and Facebook.

While selling sarees to your neighbors didn’t scream ‘big opportunity’, the India-specific example was foreign enough to the two American and one Australian interviewers that it kept us on our toes. Going into the interview, we thought the Indian online retail market was already crowded, with the likes of Flipkart, Zomato, and Amazon India. But from their example, it became clear that we didn’t know what we didn’t know. The statistic that got our attention was that 3M Indians were selling (mostly apparel) on Facebook, and less than 5% had websites. For reference, there are a total of 3M small retailers (online and offline) in the entire US.  This was a big opportunity.

Meesho’s startup journey is not the tale of a rocketship to the moon. Rather, it was a decade-long grind of long days and disciplined product development. It is a tale of constantly asking customers what they need and then quickly and relentlessly iterating and testing solutions. It’s a tale of not shying away from hard problems. They started out by creating e-commerce tools that integrated with Facebook’s Graph API. These tools helped sell and track orders. The tools got better and better, and the number of merchants grew along with those improvements.

By staying close to their customer, the team soon realized that supply chain logistics and shipping problems were the biggest impediments to their merchants’ growth. But as we all learned during COVID, supply chains are complicated and fragile. Improving supply chains is a hard problem. Rather than shy away, they leaned in. By doing so, they not only solved their customers’ problems but also built a business that is not easily copycatted.

Next, they learned that their merchants wanted to drive more traffic in order to grow. Recognizing the growing importance of influencers and online content in purchasing decisions, they built tools for these creators in order to drive that traffic. Then, in 2021, six years after they started Meesho, they launched a consumer-facing app and website, competing with the likes of Flipkart and Amazon India. It turns out that India’s online retail market wasn’t that crowded after all.

Over the course of 10 years, Meesho has methodically built their company by relentlessly listening to their customers. They have followed where their customers’ problems led them. In doing so, they have helped India harness the energy of its small business entrepreneurs. Their tale should serve as a great example to all startups.

Vidit and Sanjeev are both humble people with unassuming demeanors. That exterior, however, belies relentless energy and a steely determination to change the world. We couldn’t be more proud to have been a part of their journey to becoming a public company and wish them the best on their journey forward.

Today, Groww, one of India's leading consumer fintech companies, goes public. Groww is India’s dominant digital investing platform, enabling tens of millions of people to invest simply and confidently in stocks, mutual funds, and ETFs. Groww is Y Combinator’s first company to list in India, and we could not be more proud.

When YC invested in Groww, we thought we understood what it meant to build a lasting company: to grow deliberately, focus on customers, and execute with discipline. But over the years, we’ve learned more from the Groww team about how to do that in India, or anywhere, than almost any team we’ve ever worked with.

YC’s motto is “make something people want,” and few companies have embodied this concept more completely than Groww. They grew organically, navigated through COVID, launched new products, and stayed relentlessly focused on their customers, always with quiet resilience and long-term conviction.

Looking back at our early notes on Groww, it’s remarkable how far they’ve come. We always believed this team could build, but what they’ve achieved has gone far beyond even our most optimistic expectations. They consistently exceeded projections, created products we never imagined, and scaled with a sense of purpose and clear focus. Over time, we realized we weren’t just supporting these great founders, we were learning from them. We talk a lot about guiding founders, but the best ones teach us just as much as we teach them. Groww has been that kind of company - the kind that reminds us why we do this work, and what a great management team actually looks like.

Outside of playing point guard for the New York Knicks, my job at YC is one of the best in the world. And one of the best parts of it is working with exceptional founders, the ones who build great companies and reshape entire industries. The Groww team is a standout in this elite group. Whether in San Francisco or at a strategy retreat in Mussoorie, spending time with them is a masterclass in thoughtful long-term company building. Watching Groww scale to become a public company in India is an incredible milestone, but it also feels like the natural next step for this team.

We (like other long-term investors) are selling a small portion of our Groww shares as part of the public offering to increase the float. But it’s the kind of sale anyone would make reluctantly - this is a stock you want to hold forever. If you believe in backing great management, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better example.

Finally, credit to former YC partner Anu Hariharan, who saw what made this team special very early and championed them from the start. She couldn’t have been more right.

Congratulations again to the Groww team.  It’s been our privilege to know and work with you, and we’re excited to continue to watch you grow(w)!

Today, BillionToOne goes public, becoming YC's fourth publicly traded biotech company. More importantly, they have built one of the most important genetic tests in the U.S. Today, 1 in 11 babies born in the US are tested with BillionToOne's fetal genetic test.

When we met Oguzhan and David, they were still PhD students. Oguzhan was taking CS183C, a course we were teaching at Stanford, and they decided to apply to YC even though, in 2017, YC did not yet have a track record of funding successful biotech companies.

Here's what they looked like in their YC application video.

While details of the business model have changed, the core idea for BillionToOne is the same as when they applied to YC. They believed it should be possible to create a prenatal genetic test that works by sequencing fragments of fetal DNA that naturally exist in the mother’s blood, and that this would someday be universally adopted. Before BillionToOne, most genetic abnormalities could only be detected via amniocentesis - an invasive procedure that is only used in high-risk pregnancies.

The idea is a fusion of biotech expertise with machine learning, which is required to make sense of the noisy data from sequencing free-floating fragments.

When they applied to YC, this was just an idea. But within 6 months, on only a very modest amount of funding, they had developed the actual test and proven its accuracy on test samples.

The reputation of biotech companies is that they are expensive, slow, and unpredictable. Somehow, BillionToOne has violated all of those stereotypes.

They went from starting the YC S17 batch to launching an approved, commercial genetic test in less than two years. And they did it on just a seed round's worth of capital.

Because biotech companies are doing novel and difficult scientific research, they understandably tend to run overtime and over budget. Not BillionToOne. From the day they launched the commercial test, they've grown revenue rapidly and predictably. We watched, amazed, as they consistently exceeded their revenue targets month after month after month.

There's a chapter in the BillionToOne story that shows a lot about the character and the execution skills of Oguzhan and David. When Covid struck, there was briefly a desperate shortage of diagnostic capacity to diagnose Covid cases. BillionToOne saw that they had the opportunity to help. In a flash, they repurposed their existing infrastructure and created one of the first FDA-cleared Covid tests. And somehow, they did all that on the side without ever missing their growth targets for their core business.

Today, BillionToOne is not just a prenatal genetic test. The same core technology for detecting free-floating DNA also works for detecting cancer via a blood test, known as a liquid biopsy. They launched an early version of this cancer test commercially in 2023, proving their ability to execute in two markets simultaneously.

Liquid biopsy tech is still in its infancy, though. It holds the promise of a blood test we all take regularly that will detect cancer early when it's most treatable. At scale, such a test could save millions of lives, and that is what BillionToOne is working towards.

BillionToOne shows what can happen when you combine an original scientific idea, a highly technical founding team, and exceptional execution. We're very proud to have been the first investor in the company and to support Oguzhan and David's deeply impactful work.

I'm excited to announce that nine exceptional founders are joining us as Visiting Partners at YC: Matt Riley, Harshita Arora, Grey Baker, Christopher Golda, Raphael Schaad, Christina Gilbert, Francois Chaubard, Vivian Shen, and James Evans.

Visiting Partners are former founders who are taking some time out before their next thing to help advise startups during the batch. They work closely with YC General Partners, sharing hard-won insights from building and scaling their own companies. Each of our new Visiting Partners brings a unique perspective—from design-led products and developer tools to AI infrastructure and edtech.

Matt Riley

Matt was the co-founder and CEO of Swiftype (YC W12), a search-as-a-service company acquired by Elastic in 2017. At Elastic, he was GVP & GM of the Search business unit, and led the product, engineering, design, and developer relations teams that brought Elasticsearch to market. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with BS and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering.

Harshita Arora

Harshita Arora grew up in India, where she discovered coding at 13 and dropped out of school at 15 to pursue it full-time. At 16, she built a crypto price tracking and portfolio management app that was featured by Apple and subsequently acquired. She then received an O-1 visa and moved to San Francisco, where she co-founded AtoB (YC S20), which builds financial infrastructure for the trucking and transportation industry. AtoB has raised over $125M in venture capital and serves 20,000+ fleets across the US. In her early 20s, Harshita is also the youngest ever visiting partner at YC.

Grey Baker

Grey was a co-founder of Pincites (S23) and of Dependabot, a developer tool used by over a million people that was acquired by GitHub in 2019. Previously, Grey was an early employee at GoCardless (YC S11) where he led product and engineering. He has an MPhil in Economics from the University of Cambridge, where he graduated top of his year.

Christopher Golda

Chris was the co-founder and CEO of BackType (YC S08), a data infrastructure & analytics company acquired by Twitter in 2011, where he subsequently launched and ran the Ad Center product, growing revenue to $1.4B. The distributed data processing work at BackType became the basis for the Lambda Architecture, and Chris helped open source Apache Storm, an early distributed real-time computation system. Post-Twitter, he has been working with founders to help them find customers and raise capital, participating in early-stage rounds of startups like Benchling, Coinbase, Stoke, and Supabase. Chris graduated from the University of Toronto and has a BASc in Electrical Engineering.

Raphael Schaad

Raphael is the founder and CEO of Cron (YC W20), a calendar product beloved for its craft and acquired by Notion in 2022. At Notion, he grew Calendar to millions of users and served as Head of Design for Growth and new products like Mail. Previously, he helped build Flipboard and iA Writer. Raphael holds a BS in Computer Science from Bern University of Applied Sciences and an MS in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT.

Christina Gilbert

Christina is the co-founder and former CEO of OneSchema (YC S21), the leading CSV ingestion platform trusted by thousands of developers to build AI-powered data pipelines. Under her leadership, OneSchema raised $10M from investors including General Catalyst, Sequoia's Alfred Lin, Elad Gil, and Contrary Capital, and was named a Forbes Cloud 100 rising star. Christina studied CS at Stanford, began her career as an Associate Product Manager at Google, and was recognized on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in Enterprise Technology.

Francois Chaubard

Francois is an AI researcher and technology entrepreneur who founded Focal Systems (YC W16), the global market leader in AI applications for retail. He has built large-scale AI systems across retail, autonomous vehicles, and missile defense, and previously worked as a Computer Vision Researcher at Apple. At Stanford University, where he earned dual master's degrees in CS and EE, he created and taught some of the largest AI courses, including Machine Learning, Computer Vision, and Deep Learning for NLP. He lives in Woodside, California with his wife and two children.

Vivian Shen

Vivian is a founder, CEO, and angel investor who has built companies from zero to $50M+ in revenue and millions of users. She founded Acely, an AI tutoring platform that scaled from $0 to millions in ARR between 2024 and 2025, making it one of the fastest-growing AI businesses in education. Before Acely, she co-founded Juni Learning (YC W18), the online academy for kids' coding and math that helped define live, one-on-one online learning. Earlier in her career, Vivian worked as a software engineer at Google, a consultant at McKinsey, and led product at an AI commerce startup. She holds a B.S. in Computer Science with a minor in Creative Writing from Stanford University.

James Evans
James was the co-founder and CEO of Command AI (YC S20). Command built user assistance software, like in-site chat and messaging, and was acquired by Amplitude in October 2024. Prior to Command, James worked in private equity investing at Bain Capital and studied CS at Princeton.

We're looking forward to having Matt, Harshita, Grey, Chris, Raphael, Christina, Francois, Vivian, and James join the YC community in this new capacity. As YC alumni who've experienced the batch firsthand, they understand both its intensity and potential. Their willingness to invest time in the next generation of founders exemplifies what makes YC special—founders helping founders build the future.

We believe that it’s time to build onchain. The tools have been maturing over the last decade, but with low-cost chains, globally adopted stablecoins, easy-to-use wallets, and growing consumer adoption, the infrastructure is finally ready. And we are already seeing a number of large trends that have huge opportunity for builders around the world.

It starts with the fact that we are at the beginning of a new era in financial technology: Fintech 3.0.

Fintech 1.0 was the initial digitization of finance in the 90s, driven by companies like PayPal. The key unlock here was that consumers became comfortable paying for things online.

Fintech 2.0, which occurred over the last decade and was driven by companies like Stripe, Plaid, Brex, and Chime, involved building APIs on top of the existing financial system. The key unlock here were banking-as-a-service (BaaS) providers that made it possible for startups to build on top of the legacy financial system.

Now, we are entering the era of Fintech 3.0. This era will be about building a new financial system with code. A system where payments settle instantly, anywhere in the world, 24/7. A system where users store their assets in digital wallets, which they have full control and custody over, rather than banks.

For years, the main obstacle to building Fintech 3.0 has been regulatory uncertainty. With the passage of the GENIUS Act—and potentially, the CLARITY Act—we now have a clear crypto regulatory framework in the US that will let founders build generational companies onchain, with confidence. This is the most significant opportunity for crypto startups in years, and at YC and Coinbase, we want to fund and support you to seize it.

Below, we discuss a few areas we’re particularly excited to fund, though this is by no means exhaustive.

Stablecoins

Stablecoins are the first major success story for Fintech 3.0.

Stablecoins are an onchain asset whose value is pegged to another asset, like fiat currency or gold, designed to maintain a stable price. Stablecoins are ideal for payments, and offer clear benefits over traditional financial transactions, especially when moving money across borders. Anyone can send a stablecoin anywhere in the world 24/7, for less than 1 cent and in under 1 second, with no foreign exchange fees. This isn’t theoretical; trillions of dollars of stablecoin payments have already been settled.

People are already building stablecoin apps with millions of users. YC alumni like Kontigo, DolarApp, and Aspora are powering instant, low-cost payments and remittances for millions of users across Latin America and South Asia. Coinbase Ventures-backed company El Dorado, a marketplace for sending and receiving stablecoins in Latin America, has processed $200 million for nearly 1 million users in the past year—evidence of the region’s growing demand for crypto as a hedge against currency devaluation.

And it’s not just startups: Coinbase just launched its open-source Commerce Payments Protocol with Shopify, which enables any traditional online commerce and acceptance flows onchain with stablecoins—providing all of the benefits of crypto payments (lightning fast settlements, near-zero transaction fees) with the security and scale of typical e-commerce features (delayed capture, tax finalization, and refunds).

The fact that stablecoins have succeeded despite regulatory headwinds speaks to just how strong market demand for them is. Now, their adoption in the US is set to explode after the successful passage of the GENIUS Act, which creates a comprehensive federal regulatory system for stablecoins that mirrors the system for banks. Since the GENIUS Act went into effect, the total market capitalization of stablecoins has grown by over $30 billion and major companies like Amazon and Walmart have expressed interest in launching their own stablecoins.

There are lots of areas to build in the stablecoin space, but we’re particularly interested in:

• Stablecoins integrated everywhere: Platforms that process payments, lending, and other financial services can get massive efficiency gains from stablecoins. Enabling businesses and consumers to transact seamlessly across the platform will unlock massive value.
• Local currency stablecoins: Stablecoins pegged to local currencies that let people in inflationary economies capture the benefits of crypto without relying solely on the dollar. Governments and consumers wary of dollarization could adopt these as the foundation for local payments, savings, and lending.
• Crypto-native commerce businesses: With the emergence of the Commerce Payments Protocol and other tools, there’s an opportunity to enable merchants, lenders, and consumers to handle acceptance, credit, and payments natively in crypto. Based on the global nature of the platform, there’s an opportunity to serve customers in a new way.

Tokenization and Trading

The same rails that make stablecoins work can be used for any asset. This is where Fintech 3.0 gets really interesting. With tokenization, we can radically change what an asset is and who can own it.

Tokenization means representing real-world assets, like a government bond, a share in a startup, a piece of art, or a loan, as a digital token on a blockchain. The value here is that assets that have historically been illiquid and locked behind layers of middlemen can now be owned, traded, and used by anyone, anywhere.

In practice, this could mean:

• Instead of waiting a month for a dividend check, you could receive your share of a building's rental income paid out to your wallet every second.
• Instead of complex paperwork to exercise your startup stock options, you could have a "live cap table" where your equity is a programmable token you truly own and can sell on an open market.
• Instead of needing millions to invest in private credit, you could buy a token representing a fraction of a diversified loan portfolio.

This is already starting to happen. Major institutions like J.P. Morgan are bringing their own deposit tokens onchain, and startups like Courtyard are tokenizing physical collectibles. We’re also seeing the emergence of new, onchain native assets like creator and content coins being tokenized on Zora and Pump.fun.

And all of this is leading to a lot of new trading: businesses like YC alumni Axiom are some of the fastest-growing YC companies that we’ve ever seen.

The core infrastructure is here. We’re looking for founders to build the products that will bring every other asset class online.

We’re especially interested in:

• New credit markets: Lending protocols that use onchain identity and reputation to offer undercollateralized loans, providing capital to people and businesses that the traditional system overlooks.
• Onchain capital formation: Tools for startups to raise money directly from their users and manage their cap table with programmable tokens instead of spreadsheets and lawyers.
• New trading interfaces: With the explosion of assets, there are new opportunities to help consumers and businesses trade and invest.

Apps and Agents

Onchain also opens up a new frontier for apps and agents that were not possible on yesterday’s internet. One way to think about chains is as a new kind of operating system: a global, shared platform that’s 10x better for building apps, that no single company owns, and on which anyone can build without asking permission. And with money-as-software, agents are natively equipped to participate in this new economy.

We think this will lead to an explosion of new apps. Social, finance, collaboration, games—everything. We’re already seeing this happen on platforms like Base, where you can use apps to do just about anything: from getting a loan in seconds, to playing a game and making money, to supporting your favorite creators in a way where you earn, too.

And we think that many of these apps will also show up in chat, as agents. AI agents with wallets are superpowered, and will help people navigate and participate in the rapidly growing global economy. They’ll simplify and improve user experiences, just like they are doing in other business sectors across the world.

We are so excited to see what you build onchain. If you are building for this new reality—or have an even bigger vision for what this new era unlocks—we want to hear from you. Together, YC, Base, and Coinbase Ventures are excited to support developers building onchain.

Apply here for the next YC batch.

We’re thrilled to announce that Ankit Gupta is joining YC as our newest General Partner.

Ankit has already worked with dozens of YC founders as a visiting partner in recent batches. He has a rare blend of deep machine learning expertise and firsthand startup experience that make him an ideal mentor for founders building at the bleeding edge of AI. Though he'll frequently commute to SF, Ankit will primarily be based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts — re-establishing a YC foothold at the site of our original office!

Ankit’s YC journey began in the Winter 2018 batch, when he co-founded Reverie Labs, a biotech company applying machine learning to drug discovery. The team at Reverie developed machine learning models for small-molecule design, partnered with pharmaceutical companies, and advanced their own medicines before eventually being acquired by Ginkgo Bioworks in 2024.

Before founding Reverie, Ankit earned a B.A. and M.S. in Computer Science at Harvard and published research at ICML and other conferences on deep learning and large-scale model training. It’s that blend of research and founder experience that makes Ankit uniquely equipped to help the next generation of AI startups succeed.

We are super excited to have him and are certain his expertise will continue to support YC founders at every stage. Welcome, Ankit!

Over the last few batches, visiting partners Jon Xu and Andrew Miklas have become two of the most trusted voices in the YC community. They were both founders in YC’s Summer 2010 batch, and now, 15 years and two industry-shaping companies later, they’re back in a new role: General Partners at YC.

As visiting partners, Jon and Andrew have already made a big impact, working closely with hundreds of founders across multiple batches. Now, as full-time General Partners, they’ll play an even bigger role in selecting, advising, and supporting the companies we back.

They bring deep technical experience, firsthand startup grit, and a strong track record of helping early-stage companies grow – all of which makes them a perfect fit for YC’s mission to help ambitious founders build enduring companies from the earliest stages.

Jon is the co-founder and former CTO of FutureAdvisor (YC S10), one of the first robo-advisors to make quality investment management accessible to a broader consumer audience. After the company was acquired by BlackRock in 2015, Jon continued to lead product and engineering, building an enterprise-grade robo-advisor platform for large financial institutions. His background gives him unique expertise both in building high-trust consumer products and B2B platforms for regulated industries.

Andrew co-founded PagerDuty (YC S10, NYSE:PD), which became the backbone of digital operations for thousands of businesses. As founding CTO, he designed the original product and its high-availability architecture, and scaled the engineering team to 70+ people. After PagerDuty, he became an early-stage investor at s28 Capital, supporting companies like Clerk, CaptivateIQ, and Teleport. Andrew brings deep experience in building resilient systems and scaling engineering teams from zero to impact.

At YC, we’re always looking for ways to meet the needs of the most ambitious founders. Adding Jon and Andrew to our team strengthens our bench of technical leaders who’ve built durable companies – and who know what it takes to turn early-stage ideas into something world-changing.

We’re lucky to have them, and our founders will be even luckier.

When Tyler applied to YC in 2012, his startup idea was an unusual one. An API for schools? But outliers always sound unusual at the outset. At Demo Day, he shocked the room when he announced that he’d already signed on 1,000 schools. Over the next 10 years, he and his cofounders grew Clever into an educational powerhouse, used every day by over half of K-12 students in the USA– my kids included. In the end, his vision paid off spectacularly when he sold Clever for $500 million.

That kind of determination and conviction is exactly what defines the very best YC founders. And it’s why we’re thrilled to welcome Tyler back to YC, this time as a General Partner.

Tyler knows firsthand what it takes to beat the odds and turn an early-stage idea into a thriving business. He understands the emotional rollercoaster of entrepreneurship—finding product-market fit, scaling a team, securing key customers, and all the strategic decisions in between.

But what truly sets Tyler apart is his extraordinary skill in sales. He’s simply one of the best sales leaders we’ve seen. He brings a natural talent for connecting with customers, building trust, and closing deals. His famous “How to Sell” class remains one of YC’s most-watched videos. I can’t wait for all YC founders to benefit from his mentorship and land those crucial first customers faster.

And, of course, I can’t introduce Tyler without mentioning one of his most intriguing hobbies: in his spare time, he’s a gelato chef who has crossed the globe in his quest to perfect his pistachio gelato recipe.

We couldn’t be more excited to have Tyler on board. Welcome to YC, Tyler!

YC is going on a college tour! We're visiting Harvard, Yale, MIT, Columbia, Cornell, and Cornell Tech.

If you're a current student at any of those schools and interested in startups, we'd love to meet you.

Here are dates and links to sign up - please note these events are only for current students at these schools:

Cornell - Mar 23, 2025
Sign up link

Cornell Tech - Mar 25, 2025
Sign up link

Columbia - Mar 26, 2025
Sign up link

Yale - Mar 27, 2025
Sign up link

Harvard - Mar 28, 2025
Sign up link

MIT - Apr 18, 2025
Sign up link

This summer, YC will be giving grants to college students to work on their own technical projects. We’re calling these the Summer Fellows Grants.

We hope this will encourage the smartest students to indulge their intellectual curiosity this summer instead of doing intern grunt work. Now is the best time ever to do this — AI models keep pushing the limits of what's possible to build, and AI tools are rapidly making programmers more productive. The returns from spending a summer building things at the edge of your programming ability have never been higher.

The grants will be $20,000 in cash and $90,000 in compute credits from Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google GCP.  Summer Fellows will also be invited to YC's AI Startup School June 16 - 17, and we’ll also hold some special events:

• June 15: Kickoff dinner with the other Fellows and guests
• June 18 - 20: We’ll host you to co-work from the YC office.
• Aug 20 - 22: Co-working again from the YC office.
• Aug 22: Present what you’ve built to everyone at Demo Day.

We’re most interested in funding technical projects using AI in new ways, but we’re happy to fund anything that smart programmers find interesting. We’re not expecting the projects to be commercial or make money, though it’d be fine if they did.

If this sounds interesting, you can apply here. The next step will be a 15 minute online video interview at the end of March, after which we'll make our decisions.

The following YC companies are also offering credits to Summer Fellows: Fly.io ($50k), Supabase ($10k), Replicate ($10k) and Resend ($3k).

FAQ

Who is eligible to apply for the grants?
Any undergraduate computer science or engineering college student, including freshmen and students outside the US.

Can I apply with a team?
We’re giving the grants to individuals. If you plan on working with someone else, you should each apply individually and let us know in the application that you’ll be working together.

What does a successful project look like?
We’ll consider anything that smart programmers would be impressed by as a successful project. This might be a developer tool you built for yourself or contributions to open source. Building something with users would be cool but we’re not expecting that.

Will there be classes and programs to attend?
No. Our goal is to let you work on your own projects independently and meet some other smart students.  YC partners will be available for advice and we’ll create an online workspace for you to talk with us and with the other Summer Fellows throughout the summer.

How many grants will you be giving out?
We don’t know yet. We’d guess it’d be at least 20 and no more than 50.

Will you provide working space?
We’ll set you up for co-working at the YC office for three days at the start of summer in June and three days at the end in August. You’ll need to find your own space outside those times.

Do I have to move to the Bay Area?
You can work from anywhere but we’d strongly encourage you to move to the Bay Area during the summer. AI is rapidly changing how software is built and engineers here get to see it first. If you really can’t move here, we’ll fly you out for the co-working days at the YC office.

Can I still work an internship this summer?
We’d prefer to fund students working full time on their project but we’ll still consider students working part time because they have an internship. We think the most ambitious students will find it more interesting to work on their own project though.

Do I need to setup a company to receive the grant?
No, the grants are given to you personally, you don’t need a company or business setup to receive them.

YC is hosting our first-ever AI Startup School in San Francisco on June 16 and 17th.

AI Startup School will gather 2,000 of the top CS undergrads, grad students and recent graduates in AI to hear from the world’s top AI experts and founders. Apply to attend here.

This is a 100% free conference, and every attendee is hand-picked.

This year’s speakers include:

• Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI
• Satya Nadella, Chairman & CEO of Microsoft
• Sam Altman, Co-founder & CEO of OpenAI
• Andrej Karpathy, Founder of Eureka
• Andrew Ng, Founder of DeepLearning.ai
• Jared Kaplan, Co-founder & Chief Science Officer of Anthropic
• François Chollet, Co-Founder & CEO, Ndea
• Aravind Srinivas, Co-founder & CEO of Perplexity
• Sriram Krishnan, Senior Policy Advisor for AI, White House
• and more!

Who should apply?
This conference is just for undergrads, grad students, and recent graduates working in computer science, AI, applied math, robotics, or another highly technical and relevant field. Even if you didn’t go to school for it, you may qualify as we’ll look at your technical achievements: # of users your products serve, papers published, core contributor to open source, etc. Apply to attend here.

Not in San Francisco?
We’ll cover up to $500 for airfare for your travel to SF.

Space is limited, and we look forward to reading your application and hopefully seeing you in San Francisco.

Y Combinator is now running four batches per year: Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall. We completed the first ever fall batch last year and are proud to announce the first ever spring batch.

YC is doing four batches per year because we realize that with more frequent batches it’s more likely the timing works for founders applying to YC. In addition, the rate of change currently happening as a result of AI is causing more people to create startups, and we want to move fast to fund them.

Applications for the Spring batch are now open, and the deadline will be on February 11 at 8pm PT. The batch itself will take place in the April to June timeframe, culminating with an in-person demo day.

Apply now to be part of the first-ever Spring batch and part of history.