14 Companies From the YC Winter 2018 Batch

by Y Combinator3/5/2018

Meet 14 companies that recently announced they’re part of the YC Winter 2018 batch. (You can see more companies from the YC W18 batch here and here.)

Meitre is OpenTable for the world’s top restaurants. Half of the Latin America Top 50 list–including 2 of the top 10 restaurants in the World–use Meitre to increase profit as much as 30% by optimizing table allocation, limiting low margin bookings at peak hours, and eliminating no-shows using tickets, deposits and credit card guarantees. Last week they reached the milestone of 1 million covers (tables of 4) served.

BUMP is the peer-to-peer streetwear marketplace for the hypebeasts of generation Z. Since launching 6 months ago, the community has rapidly grown to over 200K enthusiasts who are constantly discussing and trading tens of thousands of hot, limited streetwear items, e.g. Supreme apparel. One popular feature is the ability to find a trusted proxy to camp outside a store to purchase the latest hyped item for you. Read more about BUMP in TechCrunch.

Molly answers questions on your behalf. It’s like an automated AMA that surfaces content from whatever platform you publish to — allowing you the superpower of scaling your interactions with friends and fans. Read more about Molly in TechCrunch.

Zyper is recreating social networks for brands. They’ve built a very easy to use fast growing service that allows brands to identify their top 1% of fans and turn them into an active community of advocates. The company’s goal is to decentralize advertising and become the primary marketplace for fans to connect to brands, causes and each other. Read more about Zyper on TechCrunch.

Avro Life Science develops skin patches for generic drug delivery, focusing on therapeutics for children and the elderly. Their first product is a medicated sticker to treat seasonal allergies for children. Read more about Avro Life Science in TechCrunch.

Look After My Bills reduces people’s energy bills without them having to lift a finger. Users give a power of attorney, then the product consistently scours the market and switches providers on users’ behalf, moving them to cheaper energy deals every year, saving them time and money. Currently focused on the UK market, Look After My Bills will move beyond energy into broadband and insurance, becoming like a wealth manager for ordinary people. Read more about Look After My Bills in VentureBeat.

Memora Health automates 85% of patient-doctor conversations between clinic visits using text messaging. As 10,000 new seniors are enrolled into Medicare each day and chronic disease prevalence is expected to increase to 57% by 2020, clinicians are spending increasing amounts of time manually identifying high-risk patients in electronic health records and following up with discharge instructions and health coaching. Memora Health’s software has solved this gap in health delivery with underserved populations, saving clinicians 2.5 hours per day. Read more about Memora Health in VentureBeat.

Sourcify has built the world’s fastest-growing sourcing platform helping thousands of companies manufacture products around the world. They make bringing a product to life or cutting manufacturing costs easy for ecommerce companies by connecting them directly to the right factories and walking them through a production run with project management tools.Read more about Sourcify in TechCrunch.

Swayable lets political campaigns and brands measure how content changes people’s minds. Campaigners using Swayable are increasing their impact on opinions by 100% or more by measuring persuasion instead of just optimizing for engagement and clicks. Swayable’s data science platform delivers results in hours instead of weeks, and breaks down exactly which kinds of people respond to which content. The platform is being used to power new forms of rapid-response digital campaigning expected to play a growing role in the lead-up to the 2018 elections. An impressive list of beta customers are already using the platform including the Democratic National Committee, the Tides Foundation, and media agencies. Read more about Swayable in TechCrunch.

Hunter2 teaches developers how to write secure code. Their online labs are customized to a company’s tech stack and give engineers hands-on practice hacking and then fixing real web applications. Today, companies use quarterly training videos and do automated code checks — but that hasn’t prevented the daily security breaches we always read about. In five minutes with Hunter2, an engineer can learn the hack that led to the Equifax breach, then learn how to prevent it. With a ten minute lab on managing secret keys, the Mt. Gox disappearance could have been averted. Hunter2 is already working with companies in a wide range of industries from healthcare to crypto to education. Read more about Hunter2 in TechCrunch.

EnvKey is 1Password for API keys. Even though API keys are just as sensitive as passwords, they’re still stuck in the post-it note times. Millions of developers share them casually over email, Slack, spreadsheets, and Github. The disastrous Uber breach that disclosed 57 million users’ data was caused directly by storing API keys on Github. EnvKey offers a simple, end-to-end encrypted alternative that lets development teams keep their API keys secure just as easily as they manage their passwords. Read more about EnvKey in TechCrunch.

SharpestMinds is a college and grad student hiring platform that lets companies try out candidates before they make full-time offers. They specialize in catching top performers early, before their market value gets noticed by recruiters. Initially, SharpestMinds is focusing on AI, which is the largest, fastest-growing unmet need in tech, and an area where early talent discovery is critical. Read more about SharpestMinds in TechCrunch.

Pagedraw turns designs into code automatically. Frontend engineering costs billions of dollars around the world each year, and Pagedraw can make it 10x faster, cheaper, and better than it is today. Pagedraw automates frontend development for full stack engineers by turning UI mockups into React code. The founders were fed up with writing divs and CSS, so they built a tool that automates away the worst parts of the job. Read more about Pagedraw in TechCrunch.

Piccolo is the world’s first vision assistant. It uses a 3D camera and computer vision to let you control devices with gestures. For example, it lets you point at lamps to turn them on and you can control your TV with simple hand movements. Read more about Piccolo in TechCrunch.

Author

  • Y Combinator

    Y Combinator created a new model for funding early stage startups. Twice a year we invest a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200). The startups move to Silicon