YC S23 Demo Day happened a week ago. A few years ago YC Demo Day was a rite of passage for VCs. Now it’s more of a Zoom marathon for “OK, what great founding team did we miss meeting?”.
Like most VCs, the DTC team had the pleasure of meeting with 40+ companies (enterprise infra and apps) before Demo Day itself, and we continue to engage with more, in our continued endeavor to make interesting seed investments.
Somethings that stood out through our admittedly enterprise-skewed lens:
- Generative AI (no surprise) and dev tools dominated the lineup while pure infrastructure plays (not counting AI infra) and cybersecurity seemed comparatively underrepresented.
- Within AI, it was especially interesting to see a lot of folks in different industries/roles realize that the technology is now good enough to automate many of the repetitive and manual parts of their jobs, and use that realization to build products that do just that. In some industries, multiple teams are trying to solve similar problems in different ways.
- Founding teams on average skew earlier on in their careers. Like all YC classes, they’re extremely well vetted, technical, and have the right degrees/technical skills but not many founders that jumped from 10+ year careers at FAANG etc.
- YC coaches teams to bring in the voice of the customer early and often, which pulled through for this batch. The amount of iterating these teams have gone through and the level of customer engagement they have in a fairly short timeframe is really YC’s strength, and continues to shine. They’ve done a ton of product work in the few weeks it takes to get to demo day.
- As always (and leading to continued debates among VCs), the YC premium in valuations still very much exists. And as always, even at those premium valuations, rounds do get done (for some companies, within a couple of days).
- Especially enjoyed meeting with Daniel Alberson and team at Agentive (YC S23), Adi Agashe at Fiber AI (YC S23), Grey Baker and team Pincites, Stephanie Song at dili (YC S23), Adam Williams at Magic Loops (YC S23) , Ankur Rustagi and team Sero AI (YC S23). Also impressive demo day talks from Dhiren Bhatia and team Inventive AI (YC S23), Ryan Chow at Isocode, Ohad Navon at Octo AI, Steve Krawczyk at Hegel AI (YC S23), and teams at Sweep (YC S23), Isocode, SafetyKit, Axilla (YC S23), Outset, Onnix, Tiptap, Campfire (YC S23) and many others..!
Excited to see what this batch of companies continues to build!