Y Combinator Opens Applications For New Class, As Total Funding For Alums Reaches $1.5B, Or $3.18M Each
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.
In context, when Billy covered the incubator’s progress last summer, YC had launched 380 companies, which had raised just over $1 billion in total, with each company averaging about $2.7 million. So, over the course of the last six months (or one batch in YC terms), the accelerator’s startups have raised nearly $500 million and increased their average raise by nearly $500K.
Granted, as Billy pointed out at the time, those statistics are skewed by the top alums, like Dropbox and Airbnb, which have raised $257 million and $120 million, respectively, accounting for nearly 30 percent of total funding (at the time). Now they account for about 25 percent.
Y Combinator selects two classes of startups per year into their three-month program, during which the expanding team of mentors connects their teams with investors and invests in the companies. Initially, Yuri Milner and Ron Conway’s Start Fund invested $150K in each startup. However, in November, the accelerator created a new fund called YC VC and decreased its investment to $80K per startup in an effort to “become more startup friendly.”...MORE
