Four Indian startups receive equity-free grants from Y-Combinator
Bengaluru-based Circles, Wealth42, Sandoras, and Chandigarh-based Vizitor are among the 41 startups that made the cut.
Y-Combinator, the San Francisco-based seed accelerator, announced it has awarded $15,000 each in equity-free grants to its most promising startups that enrolled with the Startup school course.
The Startup school is a free course for any founder or enthusiast to learn how to start their company, and it provides them with all the relevant tools and resources in the preparation. Through the virtual group sessions that occur every other week along with the course work, these startups will also get access to a global community of founders.
A pitch session at Y Combinator.
Of the 41 startups that made the cut, four startups are based out of India. Bengaluru-based Circles, Wealth42, and Sandoras, and Chandigarh-based Vizitor have received the grant amount.
Bengaluru-based Circles is a social payments platform that lets users discover and share credit cards, settle debts, and track payments within trusted circles of friends and family. SANDORAS is a model assessment platform that uses natural-language processing (NLP) and supports data augmentation.
Wealth42 is a robo-advisor mobile application that facilitates financial planning based on personal goals. The app claims to be gamifying the objectives of personalised investments that help users build effective saving habits, leading to wealth creation. Chandigarh-based Vizitor is a smart visitor management application, used to secure the entire in-and-out process of guests at workplaces.
As per its new model, YC invests a small amount of money ($150,000) in a large number of startups, twice a year. The startups move to Silicon Valley for three months, during which they work intensively with YC.
The objective is to get these startups into the best possible shape and refine their pitch to investors. The Demo Day of YC, or popularly called the D-Day within the Valley, happens during March and August of every year. The Demo Day for the Summer 2019 batch happened on August 19 and 20. Interviews for the winter batch for 2019 happened in Israel.
At summer batch Demo Day by Y-Combinator in 2019, 12 startups from India were shortlisted to pitch their ideas to select-investors and venture capitalists from the Silicon Valley.
Out of the 12, only 10 are publicly disclosed - , , Vahan, , (String.ai), , , , , and .
The 37 other startups that got access to the grant are based out of several other regions like the United States, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Paris, and Israel.
(Edited by Megha Reddy)
