Y Combinator’s Start-up Wishlist

For those still in doubt, San Francisco-based Y Combinator is not your run-of-the-mill venture capital firm. Over the years, the company has incubated startups that are invited at any stage and then worked upon within three months. This time, the accelerator has set its sights on companies involved with climate tech, spatial computing and applications around AI tech. 

In a blog post, Y Combinator has listed out twenty categories after the YC Group Partners meeting to review the existing batch of startups to ascertain the ideas that founders are having fun with and those that they’re pivoting away from. And, as always their Request for Startups contains some technology avenues that could be an indicator of things to come. 

First update to RFS list since 2018

The blog notes that post the discussion, the team noticed gaps around ideas whose time hasn’t come and those that are ripe for further action, but where too many people aren’t working on. Apart from the three mentioned above, the topics include commercial open source solutions, multiple types of machine learning and large language model applications. 

The start-up request, which began in 2009 as a process, needs to be made available by February 20, the blog post notes but clarifies that these areas aren’t the only ones where ideas would be accepted. “… but if you aren’t sure what you want to work on, these RPFs should provide a useful jumping off point to begin your ideation process,” it says. 

Given that YC has built credibility through backing some of the most innovative ideas in the group of over 4000 companies that it worked with, this note could well define what’s hot and what’s not in the tech domain for the next few years. Incidentally, Y Combinator hasn’t updated its RFS list since 2018, though it did seek out startups during and post the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Climate tech and healthcare remains on it

While climate tech continues to make the list after the pandemic as does healthcare where the focus is on managed services and the elimination of middlemen, the new entrants include defense technology, space tech and startups that could bring manufacturing allure back, most specifically to the United States. 

As for artificial intelligence (AI), it finds mention several times on the list of 20 and includes areas such as machine learning applied to robotics and the physical world and large language models for manual back office operations in legacy enterprises. New additions include enterprise glue and next generation enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. 

While Apple’s Vision Pro launch seems to have brought spatial computing into the list, there also seems to be an alignment around mixed reality environments that combine AR/VR headsets. Digital currencies around the larger theme of crypto tech also make the list, though it is unclear if the focus is on pegging these to a flat currency. 

The blog post written by Dalton Caldwell, the Managing Director, Architect and Group Partner at YC, says, “The world is full of founders with expertise that could be tapped into something new and great; our hope is that this list inspires some of those people to do so — or if they’re already building, to apply to YC.”