The 10 YC Companies (S22) I’d Invest In

It’s Demo Day (again)!

But first, here are my past YC posts if you want to check how my older picks have done. If you want to skip to the bottom, you can also see my own evaluation of my past picks for S17 — W22 (I’ve been doing this for a while!)

YC made a substantial reduction in size for the S22 class. Where the W22 class included 414 startups, S22 only featured 240! Additionally, for the first time since the W20 batch, the S22 batch was held in person in San Francisco.

These 240 startups represent 34 different countries and pitched on 9/7/22 and 9/8/22. 42% of the S22 startups are based outside of the US.

71% of S22 founders defined themselves as non-white. 15% of the companies had a woman founder.

S22 companies leaned heavily into Enterprise SaaS:

• B2B/Enterprise — 39%
• Fintech (including consumer fintech) —21%
• DevTools — 13%
• Consumer— 9%
• Healthcare—9%
• Proptech — 3%
• Aerospace — 3%
• Climate/Energy/Sustainability — 2%
• Education — 1%

Source: YCombinator

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The Top 10 Companies I’d Invest In

1. Feather— Modern 401(k) for Startups

YCombinator Description: Feather is building an all-in-one financial benefits platform for startups. Our first product makes it easy and affordable for startups to offer a 401(k) without worrying about compliance and administration. Get onboarded in under 20 minutes — as easy as ordering a pizza. 401(k) represents a $6B market opportunity, and this market is exploding with new legislation. States like CA are now mandating companies with 5 or more employees to offer retirement plans. Feather is committed to building financial tools and resources for a healthier future of our society through workplace financial benefits.

Why I Would Invest: Having worked for 4 startups of varying sizes (and counting), I can attest to both the logistical hurdles and cost of launching a 401(k) program AND the high demand from employees for the retirement program.

While startup employees are often much more equity motivated, as those startups grow, their composition and employee motivation shifts and 401(k)’s become more and more important, helping with both attracting new talent and retaining existing talent.

Additionally, the two founders (Saurabh and Aahan) have deep FinTech (Cash App) and TradFi (Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs) experience giving me more confidence they can solve this challenge!

2. Anchor — Banking-as-a-Service Platform for Africa

YCombinator Description: Anchor provides APIs, dashboard and tools that help developers easily embed and build banking products. This includes APIs for creating bank accounts, funds transfers, savings products, issuing cards and offering loans. We also provide regulatory coverage and continuous compliance support to our partners.

Why I Did Invest: For any readers of my past posts on African startups or YC, you know I have been (and continue to be) a strong believer in the potential for FinTech to transform the continent over the next generation.

In my opinion, Anchor is taking a very intelligent approach in the sector, focusing on building the APIs and tools for other FinTechs (and non FinTechs) to quickly and easily offer financial services. In Africa, it can take years and millions to build financial products yourself and get them approved by local regulators. With Anchor, businesses can get started in minutes with a few lines of code.

Adding to my conviction is that the CEO previously founded + exited Amplifypay and led Jumo’s (credit infrastructure company) Nigeria operations.

3. Illuminant Surgical — Project Visual Guidance on Patient During Surgery

YCombinator Description: Illuminant is helping surgeons perform safer and more efficient surgeries by projecting visual guidance directly on the patient’s skin. Using computer vision and low cost hardware, we can display patient-specific anatomical structures from preoperative medical images (e.g. CT scans), pre-operative annotations from planning, and real-time feedback, like needle depth and tool trajectory, as a surgeon operates. Our vision is to expand surgical navigation to underserved health systems and surgical specialties.

Why I Would Invest: Visual guidance is going to change the future of surgery (and already has for some limited applications/in limited testing).

However, different from other offerings in the space like head-mounted AR, Illuminant is projection-based, low-cost, and only requires a single device in the OR.

These significant cost + complexity advantages and a singular focus on spinal surgeries provide Illuminant a strong path to their first successful clinical trial and subsequent expansion to more surgeons + hospitals.

4. Kamion —Uber for Trucks in Turkey

YCombinator Description: Turkey is MENA’s largest economy, with ~850,000 independent truckers and a logistics market of $73B USD. However, in its current state, freight forwarding for trucking relies on many phone calls, emails, and face-to-face conversations. Trucking is also fragmented, with SME fleets having ~95% market share.

Kamion is the Uber for Trucks for Turkey. We connect businesses that are looking for trucks, with trucks that are looking for loads. We also utilize technology to do more with fewer people and collect data.

Why I Would Invest: Trucking is incredibly fragmented and inefficient in Turkey. Kamion provides a platform that efficiently connects shippers and carriers.

This is similar to Convoy ($3.8B valuation) and Uber Freight ($3.3B valuation) in the US. Internationally, companies like Trella (raised $31M) and Kobo360 (raised $37M) have also proven the opportunity here.

In addition to matching shippers and carriers, Kamion helps trucking companies reduce manual logistics work, which comprises a significant portion of their work today.

Turkey is a large market and a strong launching pad for the Middle East and Eastern Europe. If Kamion can execute in Turkey and strengthen their product over the next few years, they have an incredible expansion opportunity waiting for them in the region.

5. Landeed — India’s Title Search Engine

YCombinator Description: Landeed is building India’s (then for rest of the world) fastest and most comprehensive property title search engine. More than 84% of Indian household wealth is stored in real estate, property and land. However, with 2/3rds of all court cases in India dealing with land-related disputes, it is essential that people have accessible public records to both protect themselves against litigation and provide appropriate documentation for facilitating transactions.

Why I Would Invest: In the United States, we take land ownership documentation for granted. The situation in India is much different with 2/3rds of all court cases being related to land disputes.

Landeed eliminates the need to go to government offices and pay high legal fees for opinions from lawyers. Instead, the Landeed app provides title checks in seconds and automated legal opinions.

Landeed’s major challenge will be connecting (and processing) reliable data sources for this valuable real estate information. This will require building strong and sustaining relationships with local governments and other organizations that control these moats of data.

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6. Payable— No-code Payments for Indonesian SMBs

YCombinator Description: Payable is an app that helps Indonesian businesses accept payments online without writing any code. For example, a cosmetic store that sells online via WhatsApp can use Payable to get paid instantly, instead of having to spend hours manually reconciling bank transfers, which is the default today.

Why I Would Invest: Having invested in Bikayi (rebranded as Bik), I have seen the immense value of piggybacking on the massive adoption of WhatsApp to power eCommerce transations.

Payable brings a similar model to Indonesia, where eCommerce is already happening (inefficiently) over WhatsApp. The company provides a very low cost way to accept payments via WhatsApp, Instagram, and other platforms.

The TAM potential for this market in Indonesia is huge with more than 800k SMBs having an average of $500k in transaction volume per year.

7. TrueBiz — Instant Background Checks for Businesses

YCombinator Description: TrueBiz is reinventing corporate due diligence. They automate the processing company documents like Articles of Incorporation, and combine this with key signals about the business. The process takes seconds — not days, so Financial Institutions can efficiently meet Know Your Business requirements and onboard new businesses faster.

Why I Would Invest: Due diligence is slow.

TrueBiz applies an intelligence layer to the mountain of documents that are often included in the scope of diligence including incorporation documents, revenue/income statements, and more.

This intelligence empowers Financial companies that are processing this documentation to focus their effort on risk areas identified by TrueBiz, and bypass low-risk areas that TrueBiz has already reviewed.

TrueBiz is still early, but I love the problem they are solving, which urgently needs their focus!

8. LiveTrucks — Real-time Visibility and Alerting for Freight

YCombinator Description: LiveTrucks is a real-time visibility and alerting platform for Freight. If you are a shipper like Whole Foods, you can see all your truck shipments on the map and get alerts for ETAs, spoiled cargo and much more. LiveTrucks is building the freight control center for 100,000 shippers and 17,000 brokerages in the US, and helping them fix massive backlogs at ports & warehouses and mitigate supply chain issues in real time using visibility.

Why I Would Invest: Believe it or not, the technology for tracking the locations of shipments and automatically detecting and alerting on delays is incredibly naive today.

In many cases, the carriers do manual “checks” (read: phone calls) with their truckers and have to manually enter this information into their systems. This approach is clearly not intelligent and is very difficult to scale.

Enter LiveTrucks, founded by 2 former Uber engineers, that not only tracks the real time location of shipments on their platform, but also adds automated alerting to customers when shipments are delayed.

I’m most interested to see how LiveTrucks builds partnerships with carriers to integrate their technology and how successful they are in providing “intelligence” to customers and how that communication impacts NPS.

9. Emerge Career — Selling Training to Government for the Formerly Incarcerated

YCombinator Description: Emerge sells online job training to the government. For example, Connecticut has allocated $840K to pay Emerge to train 140 incarcerated people to become truck drivers. The US government allocates ~$10 billion in job training funds every year, which is distributed to state and local governments, and eventually paid off to small brick-and-mortar job training programs, with horrible track records.

In just three months since launch, we’ve already signed $2.25 million in LOIs with three cities. Our first deal for $82.5K / month starts next week. Each year, more than 600,000 individuals are released from state and federal prisons. Another nine million are released from local jails. Yet, a year after reentry, 60% of formerly incarcerated people remain unemployed. The success of Emerge creates a win-win-win situation: (1) jobs for reentrants, (2) workers for labor-starved industries, and (3) reduction in crime and recidivism.

Why I Would Invest: Several years ago, I wrote about 70MillionJobs in my S17 YC blog post. Similar to that company, Emerge is focused on connecting the formerly incarcerated with in-demand jobs (truck drivers) and the job funding that already exists from the Federal government.

That Federal funding is being incredibly underutilized today and Emerge is focused on changing that. The company’s mission is noble on an individual level, but it’s also incredibly important in training a valuable workforce for a career that’s been perpetually under-staffed.

I’m impressed by their early success getting Connecticut to allocate $840K to pay Emerge to train 140 incarcerated people to become truck drivers. This is awesome and I can’t wait to watch how they scale this further in CT and across the United States.

10. Slingshot — Automatically Monitor and Reduce Medical Bills

YCombinator Description: Slingshot is software that automatically monitors and reduces people’s medical bills up to 100%. We offer Slingshot as a free benefit to employers and charge a % of the savings we get. The company is founded by Pranov Duggasani, a former Google and Microsoft AI engineer, and Zoe Holderness, a former Lyft and Tesla engineer. They started working on Slingshot after facing their own frustrations with inflated and erroneous medical bills with the goal to save patients more money with less work.

Why I Would Invest: Even to people who work in the field, medical billing is often a mystery and is incredibly error prone. The other day, my wife received a bill from 3 years ago simply because the hospital she went to used the wrong insurance information.

Slingshot automatically monitors your medical bills and alerts you when errors are identified AND fixes them for you! Does that sound like a dream come true? Well, even better, you don’t have to pay anything for it as your employer picks up the tab as the savings also are a win for them.

I love this win-win-win opportunity that Slingshot is pursuing in a space that desperately needs technology to drive out inefficiency. Medical billing is broken and I’m excited to see Slingshot take a swing at solving part of the problem!

Honorable Mentions

• Abridge: Flexport for India
• Coris: Risk API for Fintechs that Underwrite SMBs
• Plutto: Verify and validate business customers in minutes for LatAm
• Typewise: Boosting customer service and sales productivity by 2–3x

How Have My Picks from Past YC Classes Done?

W22

Too soon to report on the good, the misses, and the ?’s from the W22 YC class! Check back in a few months.

S21

The Good

• Laudable: Raised $3MM in October 2021 following YC
• Gobillion: Raised $2.9MM following YC
• Palenca: Raised $2.5MM in January 2022 following YC
• Level: Raised $2.2MM in September 2021 following YC
• Salarybook: Raised $125k from YC, no other funding announced
• StandardCode: Raised $125k from YC, no other funding announced
• Frontpage: No funding announced
• ODWEN: Raised $2MM in October 2021 following YC

The Misses

• Union54: Raised $3MM in October 2021 following YC and a $12MM seed extension in April 2022. However, the company had to halt issuing cards in July 2022 after experiencing a surge in chargeback fraud.
• TAG: Raised $5.5MM in pre-YC and a $12MM seed round in September 2021 following YC. However, in August 2022, the company was ordered by the State Bank of Pakistan to immediately refund all customers. It appears the one of the founders may have forged submitted documents.

W21

The Good

• Moonshot Brands: Raised $21MM Seed Round in several tranches in 2021, and a $160MM Series A in June 2021.
• Treinta: Raised $14.3MM in June 2021 following YC and a $46M Series A in April 2022.
• VendEase: Raised $3.2MM in August 2021 following YC
• Kredi: Raised $3.1MM in June 2021 following YC
• Atrato: Raised $2.7MM in April 2021 following YC and a $15MM debt round in September 2021.
• Bimaplan: Raised $2.5MM in June 2021 following YC
• Snazzy: Raised $2.2MM in December 2021 following YC
• Gimbooks: Raised undisclosed funding in September 2021 following YC

The Misses

• Too soon to tell!

The ?’s

• Benga: Rebranded as “Noble” — no disclosed funding
• Djamo: Raised $125k from YC, no other funding announced

S20

The Good

• Spenmo: Raised $2MM in August 2020, $35MM Series A in September 2021, and an $85MM Series B in January 2022.
• BukuWarung: Raised a $20MM Seed round in February 2020. Raised a $60MM Series A round in June 2021
• Verifiable: Raised $3MM Seed round in October 2020. Raised $17MM Series A round in August 2021
• Bikayi: Raised $2MM in August 2020, $10.8MM Series A in September 2021
• Finmark: Raised a $5MM Seed round in October 2020. Raised a $6.5MM Seed + round in January 2022
• Dapi: Raised a total of $5.2MM post-YC
• Safepay: Raised $125k as part of YC and an undisclosed round led by Stripe in February 2021
• Panadata: Raised $125k as part of YC and a $1MM Seed round in September 2020
• Decentro: Has not announced the funding size, but most recently raised funding in February 2021

The Misses

• n/a

The ?’s

• Bits: Raised $125k as part of YC and no other disclosed funding

W20

The Good

• ElectroNeek: Raised a $2.5MM Seed round in March 2020. Raised a $20MM Series A in June 2021
• Robotire: Raised an undisclosed Seed round from Adam Morley and Asymmetry Ventures in November 2020. Raised a $10.6MM Series A in June 2021
• Dashworks: Raised $150k from YC and a $4MM Seed round in January 2022
• Handl: Raised an undisclosed Seed round from Socially Financed in December 2020
• ZeoAuto: Raised a $1MM Seed round from several investors in April 2020

The Misses

• Onetool: Raised a $1.7MM Seed round in July 2020. Shut down in July 2021.

The ?’s

• Spenny: Raised an undisclosed Seed round from CABRA VC and 500 Startups in July 2020
• Grain: Raised an undisclosed Seed round from Urban Innovation Fund in July 2020
• Pilot: Only has raised $120k from YC (or has not disclosed)
• Trimwire: Only has raised $150k from YC (or has not disclosed) — Also had previously raised pre-seed round of $350k

S19

The Good

• Localyze: Raised a $1.3MM Seed round in August 2019. Raised €10.2M Series A in July 2021. Raised a $35M Series B in September 2022.
• Narrator: Raised $13.6MM in total funding, including a $6.1MM Seed after YC and a $6.2MM Series A in September 2020
• EARTH AI: Raised $9.3MM in funding, including a $2.5MM Seed round in August 2019 and an additional $5.5MM in August 2021
• Tandem: Raised $7.5MM in funding, including a Seed round with participation from Andreesen Horowitz
• Well Principled: Raised $2.6MM in funding
• Lezzoo: Only has raised $150k from YC (or has not disclosed). 75 employees as of September 2022.

The Misses

• Metacode: Only has raised $150k from YC (or has not disclosed). 0 employees on LinkedIn. Site doesn’t load. Calling this one dead.
• SannTek Labs: Only has raised $150k from YC (or has not disclosed). 1 employee as of April 2022. Appears to have pivoted to “nanotechnology” and rebranded as Zergo. 1 employee as of September 2022.

The ?’s

• Apero Health: Only has raised $150k from YC (or has not disclosed). 17 employees as of September 2022
• Soteris: Only has raised $150k from YC (or has not disclosed). 4 employees as of September 2022

W19

The Good

• CareerKarma: Raised $1.5MM Seed round in July 2019 and raised $10MM Series A in December 2020; $40MM Series B in January 2022
• FlowerCo: Raised $2.8MM seed round in July 2019; $16MM Series A in December 2021
• Skill-lync: Raised ₹1.3B (~$17MM) Series A round in August 2021
• YourChoice: Raised $1.6MM Seed round in January 2019. Pivoted to focus on COVID treatments in March 2020. Raised $15MM Series A in July 2022
• Superb-AI: Raised $2MM seed round in February 2019 and raised $9.3MM Series A in February 2021
• Boundary Layer Technologies: Raised $2.3MM seed round in March 2019; Undisclosed round in October 2020.
• CareerTu: Only has raised $150k from YC

The Misses

• Modern Labor: The website doesn’t load and I don’t see any signs of life, calling this one dead.
• Cherry: Only has raised $150k from YC. Shut down in May 2020.
• Pronto: Raised $2.2MM in total funding. Website doesn’t load. Calling this one dead.

S18

The Good

• Kyte: Originally a Smart SMS inbox for India — rebranded as KhataBook, raised a $25MM Series A round in September 2019, a $60MM Series B in May 2020, $100MM Series C in August 2021
• OKCredit: Raised $1.7MM Seed round in August 2018 and a $15.5MM Series A in June 2019. Raised $67MM Series B in 2019
• Cambridge Glycoscience: Rebranded as Supplant. Raised $9.1MM Seed in August 2018, $15MM Series A in February 2021. $18MM Series A (2nd close) in October 2021
• Berbix: Raised $2.5MM Seed round in July 2019 and $9MM Series A in August 2020
• Scanwell Health: Raised $3.5MM Seed round in November 2019. 27 employees as of April 2022
• Inscribe: Raised $3MM Seed round in December 2018, $10.5MM Series A in April 2021
• Alpha Vantage: Raised $2.2MM Seed round in 2018, nothing raised since. 5 employees as of April 2022
• Goodly: Raised $1.3MM Seed round in March 2019, nothing raised since. 2employees as of April 2022
• CSPA: Raised $1.5MM Seed round in September 2018, nothing raised since. 16 employees as of April 2022

The Misses

• Togg: Raised $4MM Seed round in September 2018, nothing raised since. Website does not load

W18

The Good

• Veriff: Raised a $7.7M Series A in June 2018, a $15.5MM Convertible note in July 2020, a $69MM Series B in April 2021, a $100MM Series C in January 2022
• Memora Health: $1.7MM Seed round in April 2018. $10.5MM venture round led by a16z in May 2021. $40MM funding round in February 2022
• Sheerly Genius: Raised undisclosed Series A in September 2019 and $30MM Series B in October 2020 Rebranded as Sheertex. Raised ~$77M venture round led by H&M in April 2022.
• Reverie Labs: Seed round raised in March 2018 (undisclosed) and $25MM Series A in February 2021
• NexGenT: Raised $2MM in January 2018. Raised $15MM Series A in November 2018
• Juni Learning: Raised an additional $790k in January 2018. Raised a $10.5MM Series A in August 2020
• HelloVerify: Undisclosed Series A in March 2019
• Lawyaw: No fundraising since YC. Acquired by Clio in September 2021 for an undisclosed sum.
• Onederful: No fundraising since YC. Acquired by Vyne Dental for an undisclosed amount.

The Misses

• OpenLand: Raised $2.3M in August 2018 and pivoted into a messaging app. Site no longer loads. Calling this dead

S17

The Good

• Standard Cognition: Raised $5MM (October 2017) from Charles River, Initialized Capital, and YC. Raised $40M Series A in November 2018. Raised $35MM Series B in July 2019. Raised $150MM Series C in February 2021
• PayFazz: 457 employees as of September 2021 and closed a convertible note after YC (September 2017). Raised $21M Series A in November 2018. Raised $53MM Series B in July 2020
• Pop Meals/Dahmahkan: Raised $5MM Series A in May 2019. Raised $18MM Series B in February 2020
• PullRequest: Raised a $2.3MM Seed round from Google’s Gradient Ventures in December 2017 and then raised a $10.4M Series A in April 2018
• Zendar: Raised a $10.5MM Series A round in March 2019 and an $8MM venture round in June 2021. $4MM Series B in January 2022
• 70MillionJobs: Finalist in the Social and Culture Technologies Category at SXSW Accelerator Pitch Event. Raised $150k from Quake Capital Partners in March 2019
• Piggy: Pivoted into banking for couples; 18 employees as of September 2022

The Misses

• Ubiq: Little to no press since YC. The last blog post on the website is 10/30/17. I’m calling this one dead.
• Net30: Similar to Ubiq, little to no press since YC. Haven’t raised money post-YC. I’m calling this one dead.
• Plasticity: Only 2 employees on LinkedIn, no money raised since YC. No press since 2017. I’m calling this one dead.

What YC Startups Did I Miss?

Which were your favorite YC startups from W22 that I missed? Let me know which on Twitter at @amitch5903!

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