Hundreds gathered this week at San Francisco’s Pier 48 to see the greater than 200 corporations in Y Combinator’s Winter 2019 cohort current their two-minute pitches. The viewers of enterprise capitalists, who collectively handle lots of of billions of , famous their favorites. The best possible buyers, nevertheless, had already had their decide of the litter.
What many don’t understand concerning the Demo Day custom is that pitching isn’t a requirement; in truth, some YC graduates skip out on their stage alternative altogether. Why? Because they’ve already raised capital or are within the remaining levels of closing a deal.
ZeroDown, Overview.AI and Catch are among the many startups in YC’s W19 batch that forwent Demo Day this week, having already pocketed enterprise capital. ZeroDown, a financing answer for actual property purchases within the Bay Area, raised a spherical upwards of $10 million at a $75 million valuation, sources inform TechSwitch. ZeroDown hasn’t responded to requests for remark, nor has its rumored lead investor: Goodwater Capital.
Without requiring a down fee, ZeroDown purchases properties outright for purchasers and helps them work towards possession with month-to-month funds decided by their revenue. The enterprise was based by Zenefits co-founder and former chief expertise officer Laks Srini, former Zenefits chief working officer Abhijeet Dwivedi and Hari Viswanathan, a former Zenefits workers engineer.
The founders’ expertise constructing Zenefits, regardless of its shortcomings, helped ZeroDown garner vital buzz forward of Demo Day. Sources inform TechSwitch the startup had really raised a small seed spherical forward of YC from former YC president Sam Altman, who just lately stepped down from the position to give attention to OpenAI, an AI analysis group. Altman is alleged to have inspired ZeroDown to finish the revered Silicon Valley accelerator program, which, if nothing else, grants its corporations a priceless community with which no different incubator or accelerator can compete.

Overview .AI’s founders’ resumes are spectacular, too. Russell Nibbelink and Christopher Van Dyke had been beforehand engineers at Salesforce and Tesla, respectively. An industrial automation startup, Overview is creating a wise digicam able to studying a machine’s routine to detect deviations, crashes or anomalies. TechSwitch hasn’t been capable of get in contact with Overview’s staff or pinpoint the dimensions of its seed spherical, although sources verify it skipped Demo Day due to a deal.
Catch, for its half, closed a $5.1 million seed spherical co-led by Khosla Ventures, Kindred Ventures, and NYCA Partners previous to Demo Day. Instead of pitching their medical insurance platform on the large occasion, Catch printed a weblog publish saying its first characteristic, The Catch Health Explorer.
“This is only the first glimpse of what we’re building this year,” Catch wrote within the weblog publish. “In a few months, we’ll be bringing end-to-end health insurance enrollment for individual plans into Catch to provide the best health insurance enrollment experience in the country.”

TechSwitch has extra particulars on the healthtech startup’s funding, which included participation from Kleiner Perkins, the Urban Innovation Fund and the Graduate Fund.
Four extra startups, Truora, Middesk, Glide and FlockJay had offers within the remaining levels after they walked onto the Demo Day stage, deciding to make their pitches reasonably than skip the massive finale. Sources inform TechSwitch that famend enterprise capital agency Accel invested in each Truora and Middesk, amongst different YC W19 graduates. Truora gives quick, dependable and reasonably priced background checks for the Latin America market, whereas Middesk does due diligence for companies to assist them conduct threat and compliance assessments on prospects.
Finally, Glide, which permits customers to shortly and simply create well-designed cellular apps from Google Sheets pages, landed assist from First Round Capital, and FlockJay, the operator a web based gross sales academy that teaches job seekers from underrepresented backgrounds the talents and coaching they should pursue a profession in tech gross sales, secured funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, in line with sources accustomed to the deal.
Pre-Demo Day M&A

Raising forward of Demo Day isn’t a brand new phenomenon. Companies, due to the invaluable YC community, improve their possibilities at elevating, in addition to their valuation, the second they enroll within the accelerator. They can start chatting with VCs after they see match, they usually’re inspired to mingle with YC alumni, a course of that may end up in pre-Demo Day acquisitions.
This yr, Elph, a blockchain infrastructure startup, was purchased by Brex, a buzzworthy fintech unicorn that itself graduated from YC solely two years in the past. The deal closed only one week earlier than Demo Day. Brex’s head of engineering, Cosmin Nicolaescu, tells TechSwitch the Elph five-person staff — together with co-founders Ritik Malhotra and Tanooj Luthra, who beforehand based the Box-acquired startup Steem — had been being eyed by a number of bigger corporations as Brex negotiated the deal.
“For me, it was important to get them before batch day because that opens the floodgates,” Nicolaescu informed TechSwitch. “The reason why I really liked them is they are very entrepreneurial, which aligns with what we want to do. Each of our products is really like its own business.”
Of course, Brex gives a bank card for startups and has no plans to dabble with blockchain or cryptocurrency. The Elph staff, reasonably, will carry their infrastructure safety know-how to Brex, serving to the $1.1 billion firm construct its subsequent product, a bank card for big enterprises. Brex declined to reveal the phrases of its acquisition.
Hunting for the perfect offers
Y Combinator companions Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell, and moderator Josh Constine, communicate onstage throughout TechSwitch Disrupt SF 2018. (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images)
Ultimately, it’s as much as startups to find out the associated fee at which they’ll quit fairness. YC corporations elevate capital beneath the SAFE mannequin, or a easy settlement for future fairness, a type of fundraising invented by YC. Basically, an investor makes a money funding in a YC startup, then receives firm inventory at a later date, sometimes upon a Series A or post-seed deal. YC made the change from investing in startups on a pre-money protected foundation to a post-money protected in 2018 to make cap desk math simpler for founders.
Michael Seibel, the chief government officer of YC, says the accelerator works with every startup to develop a customized fundraising plan. The companies that elevate at valuations north of $10 million, he defined, achieve this due to excessive demand.
“Each company decides on the amount of money they want to raise, the valuation they want to raise at, and when they want to start fundraising,” Seibel informed TechSwitch through electronic mail. “YC is only an advisor and does not dictate how our companies operate. The vast majority of companies complete fundraising in the 1 to 2 months after Demo Day. According to our data, there is little correlation between the companies who are most in demand on Demo Day and ones who go on to become extremely successful. Our advice to founders is not to over optimize the fundraising process.”
Though Seibel says the bulk elevate within the months following Demo Day, it appears the easiest buyers know to be proactive about reviewing and investing within the batch earlier than the massive occasion.
Khosla Ventures, like different prime VC corporations, meets with YC corporations as early as attainable, accomplice Kristina Simmons tells TechSwitch, even scheduling interviews with corporations within the interval between when a startup is accepted to YC to earlier than they really start this system. Another Khosla accomplice, Evan Moore, echoed Seibel’s assertion, claiming there isn’t a correlation between the long run unicorns and those who elevate capital forward of Demo Day. Moore is a co-founder of DoorDash, a YC graduate now price $7.1 billion. DoorDash closed its first spherical of capital within the weeks following Demo Day.
“I think a lot of the activity before demo day is driven by investor FOMO,” Moore wrote in an electronic mail to TechSwitch. “I’ve had investors ask me how to get into a company without even knowing what the company does! I mostly see this as a side effect of a good thing: YC has helped tip the scale toward founders by creating an environment where investors compete. This dynamic isn’t what many investors are used to, so every batch some complain about valuations and how easy the founders have it, but making it easier for ambitious entrepreneurs to get funding and pursue their vision is a good thing for the economy.”
This yr, given the variety of latest modifications at YC — specifically the measurement of its newest batch — there was added strain on the accelerator to showcase its greatest group but. And whereas some did inform TechSwitch they had been particularly impressed with the lineup, others certainly expressed frustration with valuations.
Many YC startups are fundraising at valuations at or greater than $10 million. For context, that’s really completely in step with the median seed-stage valuation in 2018. According to PitchBook, U.S. startups raised seed rounds at a median post-valuation of $10 million final yr; up to now this yr, corporations are elevating seed rounds at a barely greater post-valuation of $11 million. With that mentioned, most of the startups in YC’s cohorts are usually not as mature as the common seed-stage firm. Per PitchBook, an organization could be a number of years of age earlier than it secures its seed spherical.

I didn’t speak to a single firm on this batch elevating beneath $10M publish (admittedly I solely was capable of communicate with a fraction of the 205).
— Peter Rojas (@peterrojas) March 20, 2019

Nonetheless, expensive offers can come as a disappointment to the seed buyers who discover themselves at YC yearly however as a result of their reputations aren’t as lofty as say, Accel, aren’t capable of guide pre-Demo Day conferences with YC’s prime of sophistication.
The query is who’s Y Combinator serving? And the reply is founders, not buyers. YC is beneath no obligation to serve up offers of a sure valuation neither is it accountable for which buyers achieve entry to its greatest corporations at what time. After all, startups are raking in bigger and bigger rounds, earlier of their lifespans; shouldn’t YC, a microcosm for the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem, advise their startups to cost the perfect buyers the going fee?