YC founders, in numbers

What getting into YC actually looks like — 1,064 founders and 530 companies across the Winter, Spring and Summer 2026 batches, measured from public data. Patterns, not requirements: plenty of funded founders match none of the majority bars below.

1,064

founders analyzed

530

companies (3 batches of 2026)

48%

are repeat founders

had a prior exit

57%

attended a top-tier school

30%

worked at big tech

5 yrs

median work experience

75%

of companies are AI-native

The founders

Founders per batch

411

Winter

387

Spring

266

Summer

Years of work experience before founding

median 5 years — YC is not only for fresh graduates

156

0-2

406

3-5

316

6-9

114

10-14

15+

Highest degree

as visible on public profiles

Bachelors499
Masters262
Not visible222
PhD56
MBA25

Top fields of study

Computer Science262
Computer Engineering30
Mechanical Engineering22
Mathematics and Computer Science18
Economics17
Electrical and Computer Engineering16
Mathematics15
Electrical Engineering13
Physics11
Artificial Intelligence11

Top-tier schools represented

57% attended at least one — which means 43% did not

Stanford77
UC Berkeley74
MIT49
Harvard39
Columbia33
Georgia Tech33
Cornell26
Waterloo26
UPenn/Wharton25
UIUC24
IIT24
Oxford21

Big-tech alumni

30% worked at a big tech company before founding

Amazon85
Google38
Meta33
Microsoft32
Apple28
Tesla19
McKinsey18
BCG16
SpaceX15
Goldman Sachs13

The companies

44%

are building AI agents

19%

ship hardware

10%

operate in regulated markets

have an open-source play

Founding team size

solo founders get in — but two is the mode

228

102

Business model

as classifiable from public descriptions — Unclear shown honestly

Unclear232
API/Infra112
SaaS75
Hardware67
Services/Agency35
Marketplace9

Customer type

Business449
Enterprise47
Consumer22
SMB12

Top industries

B2B319
Industrials83
Healthcare44
Fintech44
Consumer25
Real Estate and Construction12
Government2
Education1

Where they are

San Francisco, CA, USA398
New York City, NY, USA33
San Francisco, CA, USA; Remote12
London, England, United Kingdom11
Los Angeles, CA, USA8
Boston, MA, USA8
Seattle, WA, USA7
Paris, Île-de-France, France4
Stockholm, Stockholm County, Sweden4
Sydney, NSW, Australia3

Method: aggregated from public YC batch pages and public professional profiles; only distributions are published, never individual-level data. Fields like degree and prior employer reflect what profiles make visible, so real percentages may be higher. Data covers the three 2026 batches and updates when new batches are analyzed.