Top 10 YCombinator backedWeb3 Startups.
YCombinator, more commonly referred to as YC, has been the growing ground of startups all across the globe. Since its dawn in 2005, YC has been known to power up & boost startups from all walks of life, whether it’s just an idea or a company functioning for over a year.
YC hosts two 3-month programs — one from January through March, and one from June through August. The 11-week long training followed by D-Day, or the Demo Day is considered by founders to be the most productive period of their lives. These startups are sorted into 4 groups. Each group is led by group partners who advise the founders one-on-one.
YCombinator has some of the biggest companies on the planet in their arsenal, ranging from Healthcare to Finance, from Real estate to Education. Not just that, YC has played an integral part in building companies like Reddit, Airbnb, Doordash, Dropbox, and whatnot.
YC has always been up with time, helping companies that solve a customer’s need of the hour. Web3 is also one of these industries that YC has ventured in, and has made some really successful investments into companies that solve some major problems for users.
Here’s a list of top 10 YC-powered Web3 Startups.
Perhaps the most popular NFT marketplace, OpenSea raised $100 Million at a valuation of $1.5 Billion. The Marketplace has risen after that and is the most used NFT marketplace, reaching a valuation of $13.3 Bn in January, 2022.
OpenSea is the premier destination to buy, sell & trade NFTs including music, art, collectibles & gaming items. The platform has seen trades of over $32.25 Billions across Ethereum, Polygon & Solana.
OpenSea acts as the central marketplace where Buyers, Sellers & Traders come together for safe, secure, and fast trades.
2. CoinTracker
Found by Jon Lerner & Chandan Lodha in 2017, the portfolio and tax manager for cryptocurrency enables seamless cryptocurrency portfolio tracking and tax compliance. CoinTracker automatically syncs transactions into one unified dashboard and helps users file their crypto taxes with the click of a button.
They have raised over $101.6 Million in funding over Seed & Series A
3. Rainbow
Rainbow is a popular Ethereum wallet that is known for its simple yet great-looking features with its rainbow gradient buttons and emojis galore.
The founders include Christian Baroni, Jin Chung & Michael Demarais and raised $1.5Million in the seed round, which was followed by an $18 Million Series A.
Protocol Labs is an open-source research, development, and deployment laboratory. They build protocols, tools, and services to improve the internet infrastructure.
Found by Juan Benet in 2014, the project has raised over $10Mn and has built products like IPFS, or The InterPlanetary File System, which is a peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data.
Along with IPFS, Protocol Labs is the creator of Filecoin, which is an open-source, public cryptocurrency and digital payment system intended to be a blockchain-based cooperative digital storage and data retrieval method.
5. LootRush
Found by Anderson Ferminiano in 2021, LootRush offers a quick-start platform for blockchain games, which typically have a more complicated onboarding process than traditional video games.
The blockchain-agnostic platform also offers NFT rentals for gameplay, which cuts the cost for a new gamer and earns yield for the NFT owner.
The company raised $ 12 million in Seed funding and has been helping several gamers across the world by helping P2E games build better.
6. roverX
Found in 2019 by Bhagaban Behera, Nakul Kelkar & Sriharsha Setty, the founders built Defy, India’s first social-crypto exchange, and later pivoted towards roverX.
roverX is building an analytics platform that monitors the chain and indexes the various events to create actionable insights for web3 users to help them get better in their game.
roverX plans to help NFT traders analyze projects that can help them get good gains and avoid scams, which is the biggest problem in the industry right now.
7. NewShades
Found by Pedro Pregueiro, Christian Södergren, Olle Werme in 2021, NewShades provides DAOs the Web3 alternative to Discord, which is owned and operated by its users.
Pedro is a serial entrepreneur who is the founder of Satchel, Obvious & Scrow.io.
8. Chainsight
Found by Ernie Ho & John Lin, Chainsight builds APIs for any web2 or web3 company to detect and prevent crypto or NFT scams on their platform, secure their users’ digital assets, and increase their users’ safety and retention.
Chainsight provides a blockchain KYC/AML (Know Your Customer/Anti Money Laundering) compliance solution.
The platform gives insights into transactions and enables crypto exchanges, financial institutions, and regulators to make informed decisions.
9. The402
Found in 2022 by Ravi Bakhai & Narahari Bharadwaj, lets the users Livestream & monetize their content through streams and NFTs. An artist can perform new songs on a private Livestream and superfans attend by buying an NFT.
Trying to build a Web3 native software for creators and helping the economy, The402 has revolutionized the economy as the fans can directly pay the creator now, without giving a major chunk of it to the platform.
10. Spruce
Spruce lets users control their data across the web. Found in 2020 by Gregory Rocco & Wayne Chong.
The product, Sign-In with Ethereum describes how Ethereum accounts to authenticate with off-chain services by signing a standard message format parameterized by scope, session details, and security mechanisms (e.g., a nonce).
The goals of this specification are to provide a self-custodied alternative to centralized identity providers, improve interoperability across off-chain services for Ethereum-based authentication, and provide wallet vendors a consistent machine-readable message format to achieve improved user experiences and consent management
