YC recently released the complete list of its winter 2023 batch — there is a total of 226 startups in this most recent batch. Out of these, 5 startups are based in Southeast Asia (more on this later). 

Instead of going straight into the facts and figures, let's explore the tale behind the founding of Y Combinator.

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It all began in Cambridge. Y-Combinator, the iconic accelerator founded in 2005, is known for its success in breeding companies like AirBnB, DropBox, and Reddit. The YC name immediately reminds many people of Silicon Valley. But contrary to popular belief, they were founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

• Fun Fact, YC wasn't called YC in the beginning. It was actually called Cambridge Seed! 

YC is one of the first accelerators and definitely the one that popularized this model of building and investing. They founded the program based on the core belief that: 

"Investors should be making more, smaller investments, they should be funding hackers instead of suits, they should be willing to fund younger founders, etc."

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The earliest days. YC started with $200,000 in capital from the four founders. At the time, they would print out the email applications they had received and grade them by hand... Imagine that! 

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The iconic first batch. The program is framed as a "Summer Founders Program," like summer camp, but with funding! 

The first-ever YC batch had just 8 companies — with Reddit becoming the star of the pack.

• The founders in this first batch also include Emmett Shear and Justin Kan (Co-Founders of Twitch) and Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI), to name a few. 
• Whether it be their startups part of the first batch, or something else, the founders have all gone on to do great things. 
• After this batch, YC made its move to Silicon Valley! 

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Over the years. The accelerator's continued success has cemented its position as a leading force in the global startup ecosystem, having helped launch over 2,000 companies... that's more than 7,000 entrepreneurs! 

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From SEA. There has been a total of 110 Southeast Asian companies that have gone through YC's program.

• Ten years ago, Kalibrr was the first SEA company to join YC! They help high-caliber candidates get hired. 

The most recent announcement included 5 SEA companies in the Winter 2023 batch. 

💬 Yuma is building ChatGPT for customer support to help merchants deal with support requests more efficiently.

🏭 Proglix simplifies raw material procurement for SMEs in the infrastructure and industrial sectors. 

👩🏻‍💻 Defog.ai lets users query data using natural language! 

🪄 Magik Labs helps web3 apps accept payment from around the world by seamlessly converting 25+ currencies to crypto with 10 lines of code.

🐕 CorgiAI is an end-to-end AI solution for fraud detection and prevention.

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The future of Y(SEA). Given the geographical composition of the region, many of Southeast Asia's startups are in the unique position and mindset to scale regionally, and internationally from the get-go.

So not only do we expect to see more entrepreneurs joining international programs like YC, we are also excited to see more and more startups from SEA take center stage globally!