YC Demo Day S2025
Notes and thoughts from the latest batch
No matter what your feelings are about YC, one thing is certain: it is the premier accelerator in the world. With 120+ unicorns and a community of over 5,000 companies and over 10,000 founders, YC has unquestionably disrupted the venture ecosystem as a whole. And founders recognize the value. Every founder I spoke with at Demo Day yesterday had only positive this to say. This might be confirmation bias, but is still some killer NPS data. And Demo Day is still a great way to get together with other investors. It was great to see so many old friends and fellow investors gather at the house that Paul built (thanks to
and Mike Smith for hosting a great breakfast at their office before hand!)
The Batch By the Numbers
153 companies in the batch
127 AI/ML companies, with ~30 explicitly agents and 38 developer tools/infra
60 voice AI companies or related (a strong echo of YC’s Request for Startups which highlighted voice assistants and full-stack AI as priority areas)
29 hardware + hard tech companies (more than fintech and consumer combined)
20 healthcare/biotech companies
17 fintech companies (leaner than past years)
25 consumer companies, mostly AI-native media or networks
Some Takeaways
Founders are getting younger: Perhaps the most striking takeaway was just how young the batch was. I lost count of the number of teams that featured founders in their late teens or early 20s, may of whom were either college dropouts or recently graduated from great schools including Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, CalTech, and Georgia Tech. There was even a high school dropout in the group. And there were more sibling co-founder pairs than I expected (one founding team featured twins who memorably said they’ve known each other since before they were born! 😆)
Alumni DNA is shifting. A number of founders have came out of Google, Meta, Amazon. But noticeably absent were alums from the current crop of frontier AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, or Perplexity. Most of those folks seem to be staying put (for good reason)!
AI everywhere (obviously) but more broadly spread: 90% of the batch was AI or AI related, but there was a fairly good spread of industries including infrastructure and dev tool to healthcare and SMB. And (perhaps as a sign of the times) even a few companies dedicated to supporting PE rollup strategies
YC always offers a great read on where ambitious founders are choosing to focus. This batch makes it clear: voice is emerging as a major platform shift, agents are the next big interface, hardware and biotech need to be in the conversation, and founders are less likely to understand 2000s pop culture references than ever before. Adjust accordingly!