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The 10 YC Companies (S21) I’d Invest In

Alex Mitchell

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 W21, S20, W20, S19, W19, S18, W18, and S17 (phew, that’s a LOT!)

The 10 YC Companies (W21) I’d Invest In
YC’s Winter 2021 class set a new record for HUGE! 319 startups, representing 41 (!) different countries. Author: Alex…amitch5903.medium.com

The 10 YC Companies (S20) I’d Invest In
India, Pakistan, and SE Asia are startup economies to watch closely over the next few years. Author: Alex Mitchellmedium.com

The 10 YC Companies (W20) I’d Invest In
The most promising startups from YCombinator’s Winter 2020 class that I’d invest in. Author: Alex Mitchellblog.usejournal.com

The 10 YC Companies (S19) I’d Invest In
The 10 YC Companies (S19) I’d Invest In and how my past YC picks have performed! Author: Alex Mitchellblog.usejournal.com

The 10 YC Companies (W19) I’d Invest In
…and for the first time, a few I actually did invest in! Author: Alex Mitchellblog.usejournal.com

The 10 YC Companies (S18) I’d Invest In
Here are the 10 YC S18 companies I’d invest in (out of the 132 who demoed). Author: Alex Mitchellmedium.com

The 10 YC Companies (W18) I’d Invest In
YC had 128 companies in the Winter class. Here are the 10 I would invest in. Author: Alex Mitchellmedium.com

My Top 10 YC Companies (S17)
Here are the 10 YC S17 companies I’d invest in (out of the 124 who demoed). Author: Alex Mitchellmedium.com

YC’s classes just keep getting bigger! 

The S21 class included: 377 startups, representing 47 (!) different countries, pitched on 8/31/21 and 9/1/21. Nearly 50% are based outside of the US.

37% of the founders overall were from “underrepresented groups” which, according to YC’s definition, include women, black, and latinx founders.

The Top 10 Companies I’d Invest In

  1. Level— Pipe (YC ) for Fintech (Loan Receiveable Marketplace)

TechCrunch Description: A fintech financing platform that buys loans from fintech startups, helping them gain access to capital to scale faster. The company analyzes the fintech company’s performance and loan portfolio to source low-risk loans it can purchase at a discounted rate.

Why I Did Invest: Have you heard of Pipe? They transform recurring revenue streams into upfront capital for growing startups via an innovative marketplace that also allows investors to purchase those recurring revenue streams. Pipe was founded in September 2019 and hit onto something big, raising over $200MM since then, most recently at a $2B valuation in March 2021.

Level is taking a similar approach, but has focused on making it easier and cheaper for fintech/lending startups to obtain debt funding. 

It can be very difficult and very very slow for these startups to get access to debt funding, so Level has created a two-sided marketplace to connect these startups seeking debt capital with investors willing to provide it and is off to a very fast start!

2. Salarybook — Gusto Meets LinkedIn for India

TechCrunch Description: Pitched as “Gusto for India,” Salarybook helps SMBs in India handle payroll, employee attendance and expenses. The company says it has 80,000 employers on the platform already.

Why I Did Invest: 80k employers is impressive traction for a company that was only founded in March 2021. And that’s only scratching the surface of the opportunity in India, where there are over 60MM SMBs, the majority of which who are still using paper notebooks to manually track attendance and salaries (!). 

Salarybook also helps these SMBs hire the talent they need, bringing another set of company management and growth tools to the businesses that need them the most. I’m excited to watch the company continue to scale and continue to modernize this segment of the Indian economy.

3. StandardCode — APIs for Parental Consent and Age verification

TechCrunch Description: An API meant to help gaming/social companies deal with COPPA/GDPR compliance, automating the ID/parental approval/age verification process. Charges $0.50 per verification.

Why I Would Invest: Age verification and COPPA compliance have only become more important in recent years and most companies would love to outsource this action to a 3rd party so they can focus on their core competence. 

Enter StandardCode, which takes a Checkr-style, developer-first approach to this problem, automating parental consent and age/ID verification for Gaming, Social, and EdTech use cases. If the company can build strong relationships with the developer community, I believe they can become the go-to API for parental consent and COPPA compliance.

4. Union54 — Card Issuing API for Africa

TechCrunch Description: An API to help companies (think banks, fintechs and large retailers) issue debit cards in Africa.

Why I Would Invest: African Tech is having a MAJOR moment. Since the beginning of 2021, the continent has raised more than $2B, with over $560MM raised in August 2021 alone! Much of this funding has been to fintech startups like Chipper Cash, OPay, and Flutterwave.

Union54 has attacked a common problem many of these fintech startups face: Issuing physical debit cards. 

Instead of having to build an internal team and a relationship with a card issuer, these startups can now go directly to Union54 via their API to issue and fund cards, dramatically simplifying and accelerating the process. The company’s founding team also has experience at Zazu Africa, a 6-year-old African fintech, where they experienced this challenge first hand.

5. Gobillion — Social eCommerce for the Next 400M Customers in India

TechCrunch Description: Gobillion is taking the highly successful Pinduoduo model of group purchasing and applying it to India’s daily grocery buyers. Customers can band together and save 25%-40% by purchasing in bulk — and the team, vets of India’s e-commerce world, know how to get the retail giants on board.

Why I Did Invest: Shared bulk purchase orders have proven to be a very effective strategy for tier 2+ cities in China and Gobillion is taking this business model to India. 

This group approach taps into existing offline social networks in these cities and also leads to significantly lower prices than individuals could access themselves. 

Additionally, the founding team has worked together scaling several eCommerce initiatives over the past 15+ years. They are the ones to solve this problem.

6. Frontpage — Public.com for India

TechCrunch Description: Building on the retail investor boom, Frontpage wants to build a Public.com for India, helping market investors and traders find a community of people interested in the finance world while browsing trades, charts and new discussions taking place in real time.

Why I Would Invest: Over the course of the pandemic, retail trading has exploded, most visibly through the free trading platform Robinhood. But a strong secondary trend has emerged: Social trading communities. Think of the growth of the community and the growth of the influence of Reddit’s WallStreetBets, which now has millions of members discussing new investing strategies daily.

Public.com tapped into this cross section of community and trading, raising funding at a $1.2B valuation in February 2021. Frontpage has built a strong trading community in India, where trading is significantly earlier on the adoption curve than it is in the US. 

As the company looks to grow post-YC, I’d expect them to work to extend their early success building a community into starting a brokerage where community members can trade, unlocking new revenue streams for Frontpage.

7. Palenca — Payroll API for Latin America

TechCrunch Description: Palenca lets employers in LatAm share and check employment records, do background checks and identity verification, then offer financial services based on that data. You know they’re going to be a success because, as the founder noted, they’re literally the only option for this! Hopefully this kind of accountability benefits the workers as well as the employers.

Why I Did Invest: As more and more of the workforce globally is composed of independent contractors, individuals move between different gig economy jobs more quickly. Due to this acceleration of career change, it’s been difficult to quickly gather information on these worker’s employment and earnings history. 

Palenca solves this problem through employment record, background, and identity verifications that help employers hire faster and feel more confident in their workforce. Additionally, employees get hired and make $$$ faster, making for a win-win! 

The Palenca team also has strong data + ops experience from Uber LatAM which is a big plus as well.

8. ODWEN — Airbnb of Warehousing for India

TechCrunch Description: ODWEN is building a massive warehouse network in India, aiming to leverage underutilized space at existing warehouses with a tech-enabled platform that helps users with storage needs find their own solution across a wide network.

Why I Did Invest: Throughout the pandemic, eCommerce volumes have understandably exploded. With more eCommerce volume comes the need for more robust delivery and warehouse networks. The problem, however, is that most warehouses in India and beyond are incredibly offline. 

Today, you first have to call the warehouse to inquire about their available space, negotiate with the warehouse owner, complete inconsistent and lengthy paperwork, and agree to long term contracts (to name just a few stages). 

Enter ODWEN, which enables the millions of SMBs in India to find available warehouse space in minutes at prices 20% below market. The company already has 500 warehouses on their platform in India and is adding more each and every week. In addition to improving discovery, the company standardizes the warehouse experience, removing significant risk to the end user.

9. Laudable — Capture, Edit, and Share B2B Customer Testimonial Videos

TechCrunch Description: The B2B sales process needs to move past the PDF world, Laudable reckons. The startup wants to help its customers find and share videos of their customers using their product to share instead of written testimonials. We have some questions about how its product works, but the startup scaled from $0 to $27,000 in MRR in two months, so it appears to be onto something. Also sales tech tools have raised quite a lot of money in the last year, so there’s likely appetite for Laudable.

Why I Would Invest: For anyone who has worked for a b2b business before (myself included), you’re familiar with the decades-old “case study” format that most of these businesses use to pitch themselves to potential clients. These boring, flat, non-interactive, and impersonal PDFs simply don’t work in today’s world. 

Laudable helps supercharge b2b sales by empowering companies to develop authentic customer testimonials that can be shared in sales materials, on social media, and more. Authentic, personal testimonials have been a critical part of the b2c world for years, it’s time b2b caught up and Laudable is the company to make it happen!

10. TAG — First Digital Bank for Pakistan

TechCrunch Description: TAG is building a neobank for Pakistan, a market that it claims features 100 million unbanked individuals out of a population of 250 million. The startup said that it is working with employers to help employees get their wages deposited into their TAG account instead of being handed out in cash. The company has local regulatory approval and is live in its market with a debit card product.

Why I Would Invest: I’ve written several times about the simply massive opportunity that exists in Pakistan and the YC/VC world is starting to catch on. In the past year, we’ve seen large funding rounds for Tajir (YC W20) and Airlift.

TAG is bringing a neobank to Pakistan, focused on the 100MM unbanked individuals with a startup model that’s worked on every continent around the world over the past decade. I can’t overstate how big the opportunity is in Pakistan right now not only for Fintech, but for tech startups in general!

Honorable Mentions

How Have My Picks from Past YC Classes Done?

W21

Too soon to report on the good, the misses, and the ?’s from the W21 YC class! Check back in a few months.

S20

The Good

The Misses

The ?’s

W20

The Good

The Misses

The ?’s

S19

The Good

The Misses

The ?’s

W19

The Good

The Misses

The ?’s

S18

The Good

The Misses

W18

The Good

The Misses

The ?’s

S17

The Good

The Misses