Y Combinator '23 Batch: Top 10 Startups

Y Combinator’s latest startup batch was recently announced. From 20,000 applications, 282 were funded. The most exciting part? Some of these may become the next unicorns.

According to the stats released by YC, the most common themes of this batch were open source, dev tools, and AI, and company verticals broke down as follows:

• 54% in B2B/Enterprise SaaS
• 17% in DevTools
• 12% in Fintech
• 7% in Healthcare
• 5% in Consumer
• 3% in Proptech
• 2% in Climate, Energy, or Sustainability
• 1% in Aerospace

We went through the full list of 282 companies to see who is building what, and which are the most promising startups. Below is a list of our top 10 favorite startups, what they are building, and their founders.

1. Jaldi

Founded by: Sunny Singh

Sunny grew up in South Asian supermarkets - his family owns and operates a large chain in the US. He has carried a passion for food and retail throughout his career. Prior to founding Jaldi, Sunny was the Head of US Strategy & Expansion for Uber Grocery/Cornershop.

He joined Cornershop from Amazon, where he spent years across their grocery businesses, speciality fulfillment, and search science and AI teams. Sunny graduated from Columbia University and is a native New Yorker.

The startup: An online supermarket for South Asians living in the US. It's mission is to provide our customers with high-quality, fresh, and carefully sourced products that reflect the rich cultural diversity of South Asia.

Why Jaldi: South Asians are the highest earning and fastest growing ethnic demographic in America. Jaldi simplifies and expands access to the products they love.

Sunny believes the next big wave in retail will be cultural commerce, and how communities shop and interact with what they buy.

2. Invopop

Founded by: Sam Lown and Juan Moliner Malaxechevarría

Sam was the CTO founder of Cabify, Spain's first tech unicorn, and Juan is an industrial engineer and ex-BCG.

The startup: Invopop helps global software companies comply with local tax reporting requirements. They offer an API that records every sale and reports it to the appropriate tax authority in the right format.

Why Invopop: In the last years, 15+ countries have started to require businesses to report to tax authorities every sale, in real-time (e.g., India, Mexico, Brazil). This regulatory trend is catching up, as over 20 countries will introduce this new regulation in the next 3 years (e.g., Germany, France, Australia, China). Invopop helps companies with the compliance process.

3. Sanvivo

Founded by: Nikolai Alemi Hariri, Dominic Haul, Sven Wildermann, and Julius Rachor

The founding team all have expertise in pharmaceuticals, engineering, and computer science.

The startup: Located in Munich, Germany, Sanvivo dubs itself as the "DoorDash for pharmacies". The team is building a platform to enable customers to order medications, get pharmaceutical advice, and book health services at local pharmacies in Europe.

Sanvivo gives pharmacies software to take, fill and schedule delivery for online orders, including instant demand through integrations with 3rd party consumer delivery companies.

Why Sanvivo: Almost all pharmacies in Europe are, by law, local one-person businesses. And they are not ready for online orders. Regulatory changes require pharmacies to take and fill e-prescriptions, but many have no way to do this online today.

Sanvivo uses technology to give local pharmacies digital superpowers, enabling them to combine fast supply and high-quality consultation with state of the art e-commerce solutions.

Other facts about the European pharmaceutical market:

• Telemedicine is expected to grow by 300% by 2027
• E-prescription unlocks the market for a new digital patient journey
• Pharmacies in Germany are already doing 120M deliveries a year without any digital tools.

4. Qoohoo

Founded by: Aseem Gupta and Vimal Singh Rathore

Aseem was part of the early engineering team at Razorpay, and built consumer products grossing $1B+ in transaction volume. Vimal previously bootstrapped Coursavy to a multi-million exit, and is a founding team member and growth leader at Unacademy.

The startup: Qoohoo helps creators to grow, manage and monetise their audience across all social & messaging platforms.

Why Qoohoo: Creators on Qoohoo earn swiftly from their micro-content, courses & subscriptions directly on Whatsapp and Telegram unlocking massive growth potential.

Many are predicting that community tools have the potential to be the next big unicorns.

"The difference between creator and user is getting blurred in this internet age and we want to leverage technology to build Qoohoo as a passion ecosystem connecting the high intent user with their creator." - Vimal

Notable accomplishments: In 2021, Qohoo raised $800k from a number of angel investors.

5. Storyboarder

Founded by: Charles Forman and Joe Watkins

Prior to co-founding Storyboarder, Charles was the founder of OMGPOP (YCS06), a gaming startup that gained international recognition for its popular game "Draw Something". OMGPOP attracted millions of users and was ultimately acquired by Zynga for $210 million.

Prior to Storyboarder, Joe lead a computer vision/machine learning team at Google before working on generating maps with machine learning at Waymo.Joe's passion for web-native fiction played a significant role in inspiring Storyboarder's design.

The startup: Storyboarder is a tool and a platform for anyone to create, share, and sell webcomics.

Why Storyboarder: In East Asia, the webcomic (or digital manga) industry is an $12B market and rapidly growing to the rest of the world. Webtoon, the largest company in the space, generates $100M / month in revenue. However, their addressable market is limited by their content creators, who need know how to draw.

Readers are desperate for a greater variety of stories in webcomics.Through years of working with filmmakers, the founder have built extremely easy to use storyboarding software that has 700K users.

They're democratizing visual storytelling to everyone. The team is working on the next generation that, through advances in video game interfaces, ubiquitous 3D compute, and AI, will allow anyone to easily create scenes, pose characters, to create webcomics.

Other facts:

- Huge Market: $12B.

- Built in 650K Users.

- Previous YC06 video game company with success: $200M Exit. #29 Top YC Exit.

Notable accomplishments: Storyboarder is also backed by David Karp (Tumblr founder), Andrew Kortina (Venmo founder), and other product-focused investors.

6. GoodCourse

Founded by: Chris Mansfield and Omar Mughal

Chris graduated from Oxford and worked across product and sales in venture-backed technology companies. Omar spent 7 years working in early-stage startups in a variety of C-Suite roles, after escaping a 10-year career in banking.

The startup: GoodCourse is the TikTok-style corporate learning platform achieving 10x better completion rates, training employees on topics like compliance and inclusion.

Why GoodCourse: Companies need to engage their employees on compliance-related topics, but employees hate e-learning. We’ve all had to click through some sort of long, deeply uninspiring course. Employee engagement goes beyond the moral case for a more equitable and harassment free world - negative workplace behaviors lead to lawsuits, lower productivity, and higher employee churn.

GoodCourse offers:

• Peer-led content: delivered in a way that speaks to your employees
• Learning pathways: designed in partnership with a team of leading academics
• Personalized: content relevant to your organizational needs
• Benchmarking: across your sector to learn how to better engage your employees
• Intelligent delivery: nudges spaced across days & channels to maximize completion rates

7. Porter

Founded by: Andy Wang

Andy worked as a software developer and investment banker for many years prior to founding Porter.

The startup: Porter  is an accounting platform that's specifically built for startups to easily integrate financial tools like Stripe, Brex, Ramp, Mercury, Gusto, Rippling, Pulley, etc., and automate the tedious parts of bookkeeping accurately! It's simple, fast, and fairly priced, so founders don't have to pay expensive bookkeepers.

Why Porter: Porter helps founders with taxes, tax credits, and bookkeeping, insights on cash, burn, and runway on the 1st, so they can make better strategic decisions.

8. Luca

Founded by: Yonah Mann and Tanvi Surti

Yonah previously led pricing teams at Uber Eats, and Tanvi spent a decade building product teams at Uber and Microsoft. At Uber, she led the pricing team that created $1B in margin improvements on the ridesharing business.

The startup: Luca is a pricing co-pilot for e-commerce businesses, replacing old-school spreadsheet-based forecasts and price planning with a configurable pricing system that identifies headroom, makes recommendations for price adjustments, and executes the decisions across all sales channels.

Why Luca: E-commerce teams have to react to large swathes of data from multiple channels to build a pricing and discount strategy, such as:

1. Seasonal and Market trends, with changing customer price elasticities
2. Competitor price changes or promotional campaigns
3. Inventory availability
4. Changing manufacturing and shipping costs

They have to do this across multiple stakeholder teams such as Merchandising, Marketing, Revenue, and Inventory. This level of complexity makes changing prices time-consuming and inefficient, while still leaving money on the table.

Luca replaces fragmented decision making in e-commerce teams with a pricing system that organizes, recommends and measures outcomes, ensuring that every product is priced in a way that optimizes revenue and profits.

9. Conduit

Founded by: Saba Khalilnaji and Conrad Lilleness

Conrad leads sales, customer support, and product. He received a bachelor of science in finance from Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah and is originally from Seattle, Washington. Saba is a UC Berkeley Bioengineering alumni and exDoorDash logistics engineer.

The startup: Conduit makes software for warehouses to automate scheduling with truckers.

Why Conduit: Every day, hundreds of thousands of warehouses have trucks waiting in lines because scheduling and check in is currently done with email, spreadsheets and paper.

Conduit automates these processes to help trucks get in and out faster and warehouses get products in and out faster.

Conduit is easy to integrate with shipper transportation and warehouse management systems, as well as carrier and broker systems.

10. Radical

Founded by: Cyriel Notteboom and James Thomas

Cyriel worked at Amazon Prime Air for six years (mechanical design, structural analysis and optimization of delivery drones). James also worked at Amazon Prime Air for six years (doing aerodynamics and aircraft design for delivery drones).

The startup: Radical  makes mobile broadband accessible from anywhere.

Why Radical: The team is building a high altitude solar-powered aircraft to provide reliable connectivity at a fraction of the cost of terrestrial or satellite solutions. More than 3 billion people lack access to reliable broadband internet. Bringing underserved communities online is difficult with existing technologies.

Radical is building the ideal cell tower: a high altitude solar aircraft which can establish coverage in areas that were previously uneconomical to service.

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