Meet the 12 Indian startups that made the Y Combinator Winter 2023 cohort

US-based early-stage startup accelerator Y Combinator recently announced its Winter 2023 cohort. Of the 282 startups finalised for the cohort, 12 Indian startups made the cut.

The cohort received over 20,000 applications, of which 17% of companies have women as one of the founders. And out of all founders, 8% are women.

Y Combinator organises cohorts twice every year. Selected startups are offered an investment of $500,000—the standard $125,000 is given for 7% equity while the remaining $375,000 comes with an uncapped MFN (Most Favored Nation) clause.

This year, the batch included startups working in the spheres of open source, dev tools, and AI, and company verticals such as B2B/enterprise SaaS in dev tools, fintech, healthcare, consumer, proptech, climate, energy, or sustainability and aerospace.

Founded in 2005 in Cambridge, Y Combinator is a community of more than 9,000 founders and has funded over 3,500 startups that have a combined valuation of about $1 trillion.

Its three-month-long intensive accelerator programme is held for early-stage ventures around the globe. Selected startups receive financial assistance along with support and mentorship.

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Here are the Indian startups that made the cut.

Atri Labs

US-based Atri Labs, founded in 2022 by Darshita Chaturvedi and Shyam Swaroop, is a full-stack web development framework to build progressive web apps. It provides an application development framework using a fast API, enabling users to deploy the applications on Github, AWS, and more.

Atri Labs helps Python developers create production web applications. It has around 4,000 GitHub stars and more than 15 companies in production, including Meta, Nvidia and Marqeta, which use its platform to build their internal machine learning (ML) web apps. It also enables Python developers to create internal ML web apps.

Codeparrot

Founded by Royal Jain, Codeparrot automates API testing for developers to speed up release cycles and increase test coverage. It captures production traffic and database state to generate test cases that update with every release. It auto-instruments backend services to capture production traffic such as requests and responses coming to the backend service as well as stores the downstream calls made by it.

SuperAPI

Founded by Adithya Kavuluru and Aditya Agrawal, Chennai-based SuperAPI is a programmable API gateway that makes fetching APIs cacheable by monitoring incoming POST, PUT, PATCH API calls, and database updates to invalidate stale data and keep API cache fresh. It reduces the amount of computations on the database and computes instances, helping reduce the cloud spend.

SuperAPI can either be deployed as a separate API gateway or can be run on top of other caching providers such as Cloudflare and Cloudfront.

Mantys

Bengaluru-based Mantys, founded by Mudit Dangi and Kriti Arora, helps SaaS companies calculate and forecast their ARR accurately in real time without using multiple spreadsheets. For example, NextBillion uses Mantys to pull data from HubSpot and Chargebee and create real-time views of their contracted ARR, billed ARR, churn, and forecasted ARR

Clueso

San Francisco- and Bengaluru-based Clueso, founded in 2023 by Akash Anand, Neel Balar and Prajwal Prakash, combines RPA with generative AI to crawl through SaaS apps, auto-generate guided tours and video tutorials, and help update articles. It uses this content to intelligently guide users and increase activation rates. It converts simple screen recordings of product features into interactive product tours and how-to guides that stay up-to-date with every product release.

Qoohoo

Bengaluru-based Qoohoo, founded by Vimal Singh Rathore and Aseem Gupta in 2020, helps creators engage with, manage and monetise their communities with actionable insights.

Creators can monetise their content through live sessions, online events, workshops, courses, and subscriptions, as well as use discounts and promo offers. Qoohoo enables them to launch micro-content, courses and subscriptions directly on WhatsApp and Telegram.

UpTrain AI

San Francisco-based UpTrain AI by Sourabh Agrawal, Vipul Gupta, and Shikha Mohanty, is an open-source ML observability and refinement tool to improve AI models by observing them in production, sending alerts when they go wrong, and identifying model failure cases to improve upon.

It helps data scientists fine-tune their large language models, recommendation models, and many more by observing how their ML models are performing in production and continuously improving them over time by automatically retraining them in cases where the model accuracy was low.

ShortLoop

San Francisco- and Bengaluru-based ShortLoop, founded in 2022 by Sumit Mulchandani, Deepak Thakur, and Vishnu Vinjam, uses API traffic to automatically create a centralised API hub with up-to-date collections and identify dependencies, breaking changes and API behaviour without any manual effort.

It intelligently samples network traffic and creates API collections and payload visibility out of the box and this stays up-to-date. 

Floworks

Founded in 2021 by Sudipta Biswas and Sarthak Shrivastava, Floworks helps sales teams close more deals by letting reps send CRM updates, schedule follow-ups, send emails, and get reports—all from Slack. It does so by integrating existing CRMs like Salesforce, HubSpot and Pipedrive with the Slack workspace.

Magik

San Francisco- and Bengaluru-based Magik, founded in 2021 by Himanshu Bamoria, Mohit Kumar Jandwani and Shiv Sakhuja, removes the need for Web3 applications to integrate with multiple onramps across different geographies. It gives fintechs an API that makes it easy to add cross-border payment features using crypto. It is currently available in more than 60 countries.

Doctor Droid

Founded by Siddarth Jain and Dipesh Mittal, Doctor Droid help engineers understand how their code is impacting product metrics. The platform automatically correlates observability data (logs, metrics) with product markers (clickstreams, backend events) and shares insights on impact zones. The platform gives real-time visibility of how products are performing.

It helps track complex backend workflows that cannot be seen with just a single trace. It stateful alerting system proactively looks for 'missing states', which means you’ll be alerted even when a certain task or event does not take place.

Shyp

Kolkata-based Shyp, founded in 2022 by Shivam Bharuka and Sanchit Narang, connects shippers and carriers in real time, which ensures that freight is moved efficiently and quickly.

The platform provides shippers access to a wide range of carriers, resulting in cost savings and increased visibility. It offers real-time tracking, which enables shippers to track their freight at every stage of transit. Its document management system makes it easy to manage and share important documents, eliminating the need for physical paperwork.