Analyzing Y Combinator’s Top Companies as of 2019
The biggest accelerator in the world, Y Combinator, published a list of their top companies by valuation as of October 2019 earlier this month. Below is a simple analysis broken down into 4 different categories: Batch, Jobs, Geography, and Founders.
Batch
The batch with the most companies on the list is Winter 2014 (W14) with 9 companies: Clear Tax, Front, Flexport, Shipbob, Memebox, Weave, Guesty, Cruise, Snapdocs.

Founders
More than half of the companies on the list (53.9%) were founded by 2 employees, while 24.5% of the companies were founded by 3 people, and 12.7% were founded by just one person. As an outlier, Standard Cognition stands out for having 7 founders.
Headquarters
Not surprisingly, San Francisco is the home of 61 startups on the list. Bangalore, India, is the second city with most companies with three: Meesho, Razorpay, and Clear Tax. It’s interesting to note that four companies are fully remote: Mattermost, Sfox, Zapier, and Gitlab — the last one being the 14th most valuable of the list.
Sectors
There are three major sectors that stand out on the list: B2B Software, Consumer Goods, and Financial Technology. The first one is by far the most popular given that half of the companies (54.3%) fall in that category. Financial Technology and Services is the second with 13.6%, followed closely with Consumer Goods and Services with 12.3%.
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This is a very simple analysis but it shows some interesting trends. I’m excited to see how these companies develop in the next few years and the impact they have on the world.
Special thanks to Stephen Sper and Rafael Corral for taking the time to review this post.
