26 new YC-backed startups to keep an eye on
26 new YC-backed startups to keep an eye on
Welcome to Cautious Optimism, a newsletter on tech, business, and power.
📈 Trending Up: Job openings … automation wars … kicking the can down the road … editing tweets … digital taxes … my basketball team …
📉 Trending Down: Nike’s stock … hidden bops … having fun with code … no, really …
📊 Economic data: ADP employment data came in better than expected this morning. Tomorrow we’ll get our hands on initial jobless claims, and Friday will bring a full run employment data.
🤖 Applied AI: At the same time that CRV is returning just over half its $500 million Select fund to investors citing, per the NYTimes, “market conditions have changed for the worse,” and “valuations for start-ups are too high relative to their potential for a payoff,” we’re seeing some really big rounds land:
The Select fund backed later-stage startups. The above rounds are earlier-stage. Therefore, we see a massive optimism gap between current late-stage startup investment opportunities and new AI startup rounds. I suppose we can file this entire chapter under the ‘late-stage venture capital is completely broken today’ umbrella.
The recent YC grads I’m most excited about
I love demo days. There’s nothing quite like watching dozens of smart folks — often pretty early in their careers! — show off something that they built and really believe in. It’s akin to a very grown-up version of show-and-tell, but instead of presenting to a class, the founders are showing off their work to the global venture capital industry en masse.
Something else fun about demo days is picking a fantasy team of sorts — the startups that you think are the most exciting, enticing, whacky and fun, or otherwise interesting. I used to help write TechCrunch’s coverage of demo days, and even though I have left the mothership, I can’t break this particular habit.
So, here are the 26 recent Y Combinator graduates that I am most excited about from the recent cohort: