Y Combinator (and what happened after) for Nordic Founders

Are you a Nordic founder? Are you looking to build/grow your company in the US with the best partners/talent/customers/investors?

I and my co-founders Riku Lindholm and Albert Nazander founded Meru Health in 2016 to build the new standard for mental health care. In the summer of 2018, our company got accepted into Y Combinator (YC) in Mountain View, California. YC is considered to be perhaps the world’s best startup accelerator, and it is also notoriously difficult to get in; YC accepts roughly 1.5% of applicants every year.

We got in on our 6th try. Yes, I’m not joking, it took us six applications. The first three applications did not lead anywhere. The next three lead to a face to face interview with YC partners in Silicon Valley, and then finally, we got accepted on the 6th try. The reason for getting accepted on the 6th try, we were told, was that we kept making steady progress in between our applications and thus demonstrated that we could execute in healthcare, which is typically hard.

Before going into whether YC was good or not for us, I’ll first talk a bit more about why we wanted to get into YC in the first place. We, like many other Nordic founders, did not have significant networks or local business expertise in the US. None of us had studied in a top US university which would have given us more credibility and access to local networks. In general the US is far more of a class society than the Nordics and the amount of trust between people in the society is way lower than in the Nordics. People don’t trust each other so easily but require more “validation” to trust others, e.g., personal introductions or well-known university degrees, etc. We knew that we would need to become more credible in general to be able to build a business in the US.

We figured that YC would be an excellent way for us to acquire these things in a relatively short time. Kind of like “hack our way into the market.” So one of the reasons we wanted to get into YC was to gain access to local networks and to understand better how to build our business in the US. We also figured that getting into YC would help us raise money from US investors, further helping us to get integrated into the US markets. Finally, we felt that YC could help us hire local talent with the additional credibility they bring and through their extensive networks.

So did all this work out for us? And has it still been valuable for us now 1.5 years after graduation?

Yes! In short, the program was precious for us, helping us better understand the market, search for our product/market fit, and to raise our Series Seed round. Additionally, YC has been delivering constant value even after graduation.

To elaborate a bit more, we went through YC’s 3-month accelerator program as part of the summer 2018 batch and had such a great time! During the batch, we worked on avg. 6/7 days and mostly on our go-to-market strategy and finding our product/market fit. We had great help and support from our awesome group partners Dalton Caldwell, Jared Friedman, and Diego Rey. Many thanks for your help!

We also met with the smartest, most determined and inspiring founders from many companies and have since then hosted many dinners and grill parties with our new friends. One of the best things about YC is all the other founders & startups you meet. It’s like this supercharged group of people, coming together from around the world, working on the most inspiring challenges out there from innovating in medicine, cellular biology, building crypto technologies & services, developing new consumer technologies, to building space rockets.

We raised a $4.2M Series Seed investment round in two main batches after YC’s Demo Day event (which is awesome btw.). We raised an initial $2M during the fall of 2018 on SAFE notes. Then during the winter & new year, Freestyle Capital & partner Josh Felser became interested in investing more into our round, and we eventually had Josh come in and lead a larger $4.2M round, which we closed in the spring of 2019.

Since we graduated, we have gotten a ton of help from our YC partners (yes, they support you even after you’ve graduated). We’ve also been actively working with other YC companies and founders in various ways. We’ve been sparring a lot with other founders who have gone after similar markets to learn what worked/didn’t work, and we’ve recruited several key people through introductions made through the YC network of founders & investors. We also got quite a lot of good press coverage after YC which has been helpful in informing people about Meru and also building credibility. The YC “stamp” has also given us more credibility with our customers and their employees/our end users. Validation is important!

In conclusion, we’ve been very happy with our decision & persistence, which got us into YC. YC has delivered a lot of value for Meru Health. I can highly recommend the experience to other (Nordic) founders. Even if you are not (only) looking to commercialize your business in the US, you can learn so much at YC and get connected with the most awesome founders building an exciting future for us all.

Thanks to Reetta Heiskanen for editorial help!