Y-combinator companies in India

Abstract

YCombinator ('YC') is the largest and most impactful incubator in the world right now. Companies such as Reddit, Dropbox, AirBnB, etc., have all started their growth journey after joining YC. In the recent past, YC has been identifying many Indian startups compared to its early years. Given that YC places great emphasis on context and innovative bus iness models, it would be interesting to evaluate what kind of companies are getting selected and how the founders are leveraging the legit imacy that YC bestows. The objective of our research was to examine YC's portfolio in India and understand the breakup of the portfo lio to identify themes of its investments across different sectors, categories and stage. Addit ionally, we attempted to understand the value-add YC bri ngs to table for Indian startups and how it leverages its expertise and global network to help entrepreneurs scale their business. Historically, YC's portfolio in India has not been as successful as some of the other markets and we plan to further deep dive to identify the key reasons behind the same. Having said that, YC has left an indelible mark on India's startup ecosystem and invested in companies from sectors that flew under the radar for a long time or were considered too risky. The research will finally t ry to bring out the overall impact YC has had on the Indian start-up ecosystem outlining what could be a future road map fo r success for the incubator. Before we start, we'd like to thank Prof. Suresh Bhagavatula for giving us this opportunity to explore the Indian start-up Ia ndscape and for his guidance during our research.