Y Combinator to hold India-specific interviews for Winter 2020 batch in Nov

Silicon Valley-based startup accelerator Y Combinator has announced an India-specific interview round for its Winter 2020 startup incubation programme.

The interviews are scheduled from November 10 to 12 in Bengaluru. Registrations are currently open to founders based in India and will be open till September 25, Y Combinator said in a blog on Sunday.

The selected startups will immediately gain funding and access to Y Combinator’s resources and will then go on to enrol at the incubation programme in January next year.

The usual process is that the selected startups move to Mountain View, California for three months where founders work on their business models and finetune their pitches.

The programme culminates in an event called Demo Day when the startups present their pitches to a selected, invite-only audience. 

Y Combinator makes seed investments of $150,000 each in a number of startups bi-annually through the programmes.

This would be the second time Y Combinator is conducting an India-specific round of interviews given a large number of applications from the country. The first was when startups were screened for enrolment in the Summer 2019 batch in April early this year.

Y Combinator has funded over 50 Indian startups to date including online taxpayers platform ClearTax, consumer resellers platform Meesho and online payment solutions platform Razorpay.

Started in 2005, Y Combinator has incubated a number of startups globally including home-renting company Airbnb, social media network Reddit, file sharing and storage company Dropbox, question-and-answer website Quora and online payments solutions Stripe.