Hi everyone,

We put together a map that shows where YC companies are from. It’s based on the location of the founders before applying for YC. As a founder and previous YC applicant, I know how daunting the application process can be, especially, when you are far away from San Francisco. Now that I work for YC, I wanted to help build it.

Let us know if you have any feedback

Thanks

This is great! Thanks.

Would it be possible to break down the US startups by state? It'd be great to connect with local people, if possible.

Yeah, we talked about it. We'll probably include it in a future iteration

If you do US States, could you do Canadian provinces as well?

That's really cool. I would love to know/see how many YC companies are going back to their country of origin versus how many are actually settle in the US. Thanks for the effort.

Very handy, thanks for this. Mercator projection makes most of the major countries in Europe and Asia extra small but not sure how great anything else would look either.

> It’s based on the location of the founders before applying for YC.

How exactly do you collect that data?

I see at least one company which is off.

From the applications. Please note, that applications only started asking this question from 2009.

rrecuero strangely Spain as a very low representation in YC alumni of only one company.

We, spaniards, clearly need to change this :)

Reddit is missing. ;)

Edit: Actually it looks like you're missing all of S05.

Great work. You could add Impraise and Gitlabs to the Netherlands.

It lists "Swish" as an italian company, is it?

Looks good. One suggestion if I may:

When I click on a country in map, the text listing should show the name of the country and not just the flag. Flags are great but I would rather read "China" than seeing the flag since a lot of us may not know every flag in the world.

The top 5 are :

    United States: 1062

    Canada: 62

    UK: 42

    India: 29

    France: 16

Rest are all in single digits so far.

The map really brings into light Japan's lack of presence in the tech world.. They barely register on the map.

I'm surprised India has more presence than China considering how much the news talks about places like Shenzhen.

Chinese is in general not as fluent in English as people in India (English is one of its official languages) or other European countries (easily multilingual). For most educated Chinese who don't have overseas experience, reading is probably okay, but speaking / listening is challenging -- we are trained to take exams growing up (e.g., doing multiple choices on paper).

If you can't pitch in fluent English and you can't hire someone to help you (due to the resource constraint of your early stage startup), how can you be properly evaluated by YC or other Silicon Valley VC firms?

Another possible reason may be easy to access local capital in China.

Innovation Works with Kaifu Lee (the guy who used to run google china) is like a Chinese YC. The Chinese market is also very inward facing at this point due to protectionism and the GFW.

I'm sure a lot of founders are still Chinese, just that they are coming from the USA (or other countries) before applying to YC.

Israel has 10 as well.

Interesting map! German here, surprising to see only 3 German companies have made the list. I don't know what I expected, but 3 YC companies seems like a really low number.

(Micro-nitpick: The color scale is a little bit confusing. Darker = more startups; but USA [1,062 startups] and Canada [62] both have #597b9f as color, even though there's a one-thousand-company difference)

Good stuff.

I noticed an error: Flutterwave and New Incentives are supposed to be in Nigeria not Niger.

Niger is above Nigeria (the darkest country in Africa).

Weird, this doesn't seem to have Stripe listed despite it being the first startup listed on ycombinator's homepage.

Probably incorporation affects result by a wide margin.

E.g. our company (not YC alumni) is incorporated in Delaware and based in Mountain View, but both founders are Polish and half of the employees are in Poland. On such list, we would come up as USA company. Probably quite a few companies have the same effect.

It is based on the application, where were you located before applying?

Very cool to see companies mapped out.

Slight nitpick - I really wish click to drag panning and mousewheel/pinch zooming was supported on the map. Navigating the map was a bit of a chore - mostly for smaller geographically sized countries.

Pretty cool. One nitpick: I wish the darkness was proportional to the number of companies. The U.S. is at 1062 and is as dark as countries with 7 or 29. I wish there were more contrast.

Sadly completely unusable on mobile.

The link to the company zipphone in India goes to a AliExpress link. Does anyone else see that ?

ZipPhone founder here.

For some reason my YC profile had a non-existent website listed (awaaz.mobi). I have changed it now to zipphone.com (not hosted, since the company was acquired), and changed the email to founders@zipphone.com.

zipphone was acquired https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/07/hike-zipphone/

the link of the only Polish company goes to a Chinese website

Credictive - s2012 is no longer active

Need one from Myanmar

How comes Sixa is not listed? It is Ukrainian, S16

The list is not exhaustive. A company may not be included for several different reasons i.e they may choose to remain off the record

Would love to see Awesound listed. I see it's not in US, UK or Ireland lists. (I was in Ireland before YCF2). Thanks!

can't see Israel!

I think the founder of Greplin/Cue was from Jerusalem

You need to zoom in to find Israel. There are several companies from Israel