What YC Is Betting On?
"Y Combinator only funds AI wrappers now." I kept hearing this. So I decided to check. I pulled data on every single company from the last 5 YC batches. 793 startups. 1,625 founders. Scraped their bios, tags, industries, partner assignments - everything. Then I ran the numbers and built a full interactive dashboard breaking all of this down: https://yc-trends.vercel.app/ Just a weekend rabbit hole that got out of hand. The wrapper thing? Mostly a myth. Only 15% are thin wrappers on LLMs. And it's actually going DOWN, 17% a year ago, under 13% now. The real story? Deep tech is surging. Companies training their own models, building robots, doing actual research - that jumped to 29% of the latest batch. YC isn't getting lazy. It's getting pickier. Each partner has a distinct fingerprint. If you're pitching YC, match your company type to the right partner - it matters. Diana Hu = infra, Garry Tan = contrarian bets, Harj Taggar = enterprise SaaS, Nicolas Dessaigne is the "healthcare + security" partner, Pete Koomen is the "classic SaaS" partner. 1 comments on Hacker News.
"Y Combinator only funds AI wrappers now." I kept hearing this. So I decided to check. I pulled data on every single company from the last 5 YC batches. 793 startups. 1,625 founders. Scraped their bios, tags, industries, partner assignments - everything. Then I ran the numbers and built a full interactive dashboard breaking all of this down: https://yc-trends.vercel.app/ Just a weekend rabbit hole that got out of hand. The wrapper thing? Mostly a myth. Only 15% are thin wrappers on LLMs. And it's actually going DOWN, 17% a year ago, under 13% now. The real story? Deep tech is surging. Companies training their own models, building robots, doing actual research - that jumped to 29% of the latest batch. YC isn't getting lazy. It's getting pickier. Each partner has a distinct fingerprint. If you're pitching YC, match your company type to the right partner - it matters. Diana Hu = infra, Garry Tan = contrarian bets, Harj Taggar = enterprise SaaS, Nicolas Dessaigne is the "healthcare + security" partner, Pete Koomen is the "classic SaaS" partner.
"Y Combinator only funds AI wrappers now." I kept hearing this. So I decided to check. I pulled data on every single company from the last 5 YC batches. 793 startups. 1,625 founders. Scraped their bios, tags, industries, partner assignments - everything. Then I ran the numbers and built a full interactive dashboard breaking all of this down: https://yc-trends.vercel.app/ Just a weekend rabbit hole that got out of hand. The wrapper thing? Mostly a myth. Only 15% are thin wrappers on LLMs. And it's actually going DOWN, 17% a year ago, under 13% now. The real story? Deep tech is surging. Companies training their own models, building robots, doing actual research - that jumped to 29% of the latest batch. YC isn't getting lazy. It's getting pickier. Each partner has a distinct fingerprint. If you're pitching YC, match your company type to the right partner - it matters. Diana Hu = infra, Garry Tan = contrarian bets, Harj Taggar = enterprise SaaS, Nicolas Dessaigne is the "healthcare + security" partner, Pete Koomen is the "classic SaaS" partner. 1 comments on Hacker News.
"Y Combinator only funds AI wrappers now." I kept hearing this. So I decided to check. I pulled data on every single company from the last 5 YC batches. 793 startups. 1,625 founders. Scraped their bios, tags, industries, partner assignments - everything. Then I ran the numbers and built a full interactive dashboard breaking all of this down: https://yc-trends.vercel.app/ Just a weekend rabbit hole that got out of hand. The wrapper thing? Mostly a myth. Only 15% are thin wrappers on LLMs. And it's actually going DOWN, 17% a year ago, under 13% now. The real story? Deep tech is surging. Companies training their own models, building robots, doing actual research - that jumped to 29% of the latest batch. YC isn't getting lazy. It's getting pickier. Each partner has a distinct fingerprint. If you're pitching YC, match your company type to the right partner - it matters. Diana Hu = infra, Garry Tan = contrarian bets, Harj Taggar = enterprise SaaS, Nicolas Dessaigne is the "healthcare + security" partner, Pete Koomen is the "classic SaaS" partner.
Hacker News story: What YC Is Betting On?
![Hacker News story: What YC Is Betting On?]()
Reviewed by Tha Kur
on
February 23, 2026
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