Meet the YC Summer 2022 Batch

For the first time since the Winter 2020 batch, the Summer 2022 batch was in person. The batch kicked off with an in-person retreat followed by weekly meetups in San Francisco and around the world. And soon after Demo Day, we’re hosting an end-of-batch celebration with the entire YC community.

The program was still remote friendly with office hours and batch talks online, but we encouraged all teams who could to move to the Bay Area to participate. About 30% of the batch moved to the Bay Area during the 3-month program, and about 23% were already in the Bay Area when they applied to YC.

For the Summer 2022 batch, we received 19,000 applications from founders around the world and funded 240. Today, these founders will present their companies to an invite-only audience of investors at our 35th Demo Day. Here’s what we saw in the S22 batch:

50% of the batch applied more than once
43% of the batch were accepted with only an idea
36% of the batch raised money before YC
71% of the batch had zero revenue before YC
7% had more than $50k of monthly revenue when accepted

S22 companies are building in more than 100 verticals. There isn’t an industry being touched by software that we don’t fund. During the batch, we divide the companies into 33 small groups that are organized by vertical. The groups meet for bi-weekly office hours led by 18 group partners and visiting group partners. During these group office hours, founders help each other and get the benefit of an intimate setting within the larger batch. At a high level:

39% in B2B/Enterprise SaaS
21% in Fintech
13% in DevTools
9% in Consumer
9% in Healthcare
3% in Proptech
3% in Aerospace
2% in Climate, Energy, or Sustainability
1% in Education

The companies come from 34 countries around the world that combined have over 3 billion inhabitants. About 42% are outside of the U.S. – and a sign of the times, 35% of the companies are remote and 37% are remote friendly. The top countries represented include:

United States: 140 startups
India: 19 startups
United Kingdom: 11 startups
Israel: 8 startups
Canada: 6 startups
Germany: 6 startups
Mexico: 6 startups
France: 6 startups
Nigeria: 5 startups

New this batch, we added “multiracial” as an option when collecting demographic information. While this change makes it harder for us to measure our progress compared to prior batches, this addition was long overdue. Here is the demographic breakdown for the S22 batch:

13% Asian
3% Black
6% Hispanic or Latino
5% Middle Eastern or North African
8% Multiracial
15% South Asian
29% White

Additionally, 15% of the companies have a woman founder and 9% of the founders are women.

Meet the YC Summer 2022 Batch

Author

Michael Seibel