In 2023, three quarters of YC startups arrived with no prior funding — up from about half in 2022

Asked:

“show me the proportion of yc startups that go accepter into yc with and without raising any prior funding (i.e. yc being their first investor vs having investros already) give me breakdown year by year”

YC's own batch posts report this metric for four batches across two years — Winter and Summer 2022 (654 funded startups) and Winter and Summer 2023 (511) — not for every year of YC's history. Percentages below weight each batch by its number of funded startups; counts are estimates from YC's rounded figures.

YC was the first investor (never raised before YC) Had prior investors (raised before YC)
The YC-first share jumped 24 percentage points in one year, from 52.0% (est. 340 of 654) in 2022 to 76.0% (est. 389 of 511) in 2023. ycombinator.com
Winter 2022 was the only batch where previously funded startups were the majority: 55% of its 414 companies had raised money before YC. ycombinator.com
By Summer 2023, YC said 81% of the 229 funded startups “had never raised a dime” — the highest of the four batches. ycombinator.com
The Winter 2023 figure (28% with prior funding, 282 startups) is corroborated by an independent write-up of the batch. smartbranding.com

Batch-level figures as YC published them

BatchFunded startupsPrior funding %No prior funding %YC's wordingSource

Data: Y Combinator's official “Meet the batch” blog posts for W22, S22, W23 and S23, collected in 2024; 9 source rows (with duplicate URL variants) reduced to 4 unique batches, plus 2 precomputed annual aggregates. Each percentage is the share of funded (accepted) startups in a batch — not applicants — that had or had not raised money before YC; annual shares weight batches by funded count. Counts are estimated from YC's rounded percentages. “YC first investor” means YC's phrase “never raised” or the complement of “raised money before YC”; it does not distinguish equity from every non-dilutive source. YC did not publish this metric for other years, so no other years appear — missing years are unknown, not zero.

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