Eight current and former David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science students received $2.5M in funding from one of the world's biggest and most prestigious startup accelerators, the Y Combinator (YC).
Based in Silicon Valley, the YC hosts an annual program split into two cohorts that participate in the winter and spring. Successful applicants receive $500,000 in funding and other resources such as networking sessions, alumni talks and mentorship, particularly on finance, public relations, or product design. One of the most prominent events is Demo Day, where the cohort presents their startups to an audience of 1,500 investors and media figures, across two full days. Some notable YC alumni include Airbnb, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Reddit, and Twitch.
With an average acceptance rate of three per cent, entry to the program is extremely competitive, and from an application pool of 27,000, only 260 companies were selected for the latest cohort.
Eleven startups from the winter 2024 cohort have ties to the University of Waterloo: Attunement, Double, DraftAid, Leaping, Nuanced and OffDeal were founded by Engineering alumni while Blacksmith, Datacurve, Momentic, Swift and Tower were founded by former and current students at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science.
To learn more about each start-up and their future goals, please read the full article on Waterloo News.
