Y Combinator is renowned in Silicon Valley for quite a lot of reasons, but there’s one service that has quietly change into certainly one of its strongest: an internet founder-matching tool.
“I feel that is the most dear digital product that YC has built (i.e. more priceless than Bookface, etc.). It’s astonishing what number of founders I meet who met one another on the YC co-founder matching platform,” tweeted seed investor Nikhil Basu Trivedi. (Bookface refers to YC’s famed online collection of how-to startup advice for its program participants.)
Recent Y Combinator grad Hona is an example, although its founders’ meet-cute story is a little more exciting than simply using that tool.
Hona is a GenAI medical records startup. It integrates into multiple electronic records systems after which summarizes a patient’s medical records, helping doctors prep for the patient’s visit.
It was initially founded by two friends who’ve known one another since middle school, Danielle Yoesep and Adam Steinle. They reconnected after graduating college and respective early careers in tech and biotech. Steinle had been a biomedical engineer, Goldman banker and massive tech product manager at Facebook. Yoesep was a scientist for a biotech startup that had just been acquired. They were hanging out with their highschool friends while home for Thanksgiving, chatting about wanting to do a startup when the concept for Hona arose. While neither of them are doctors themselves, each had members of the family who’re doctors or in healthcare and so they soon settled on an idea: AI to help doctors with patient data summaries.
They knew they needed an AI specialist co-founder, so signed up on the Y Combinator Co‑Founder Matching Platform. They found one in Shuying Zhang, who also knew she desired to do a startup, something in healthcare and AI, and had signed up on the service. Zhang’s background combined biomedical engineering and software development, most recently working on AI at Google, and she or he was at Amazon prior to that.
What got here next was a process that sounds a bit like Tinder for co-founders.
Yoesep and Steinle swiped through profiles within the matching tool as did Zhang. Each of them held several meet-and-greets with potential co-founders. When Zhang met with Yoesep and Steinle, they immediately clicked so well that the long-time friends offered Zhang a full one-third share of the corporate.
“We literally met one another and like three weeks later, we’re jobless, attempting to construct this,” Steinle told TechCrunch.
Having met on Y Combinator, with their backgrounds in tech, they were precisely the style of startup sure to be accepted into the competitive program. They immediately applied to YC for the Summer 2023 batch.
And they were promptly rejected.
In order that they started working on their very own, constructing a prototype, showing it to their network of doctors, earning solid reviews and raising a small seed round.
About 4 months later, they applied to YC again for the winter 2024 batch, and were accepted. One in all the explanations they got within the second time, Yoesep recalled, was that they never modified directions, or never pivoted, to make use of the hackneyed Silicon Valley term. Another excuse was “because of our dynamic during our interview, showing that we had grown close and enjoyed working together,” she said.
Things began cooking for them after that. Medical doctors at Duke and Harvard agreed to check the product and write a white paper, as a consequence of publish later this month. Some angels who were known within the tech and biotech worlds invested. And by the point Hona graduated from YC and did its famed Demo Day, it had already raised a $3 million seed round from General Catalyst (which is pursuing health tech so seriously it bought a hospital system), Samsung, Rebel Fund (founded by Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman and Cruise co-founder Daniel Kan), Allegis Capital and 1984 Ventures.
Hona still has a troublesome road ahead. AI for medical transcription is an increasingly crowded field. Big cloud providers like Google and Amazon are offering such tools and dozens of startups are tackling it, too.
But Steinle says that Hona will compete since it’s “super customizable” to go looking through medical records for the precise data a selected doctor needs prior to seeing a patient. A cardiologist would get a distinct summary than a nephrologist. For example, the upcoming white paper is on kidney stone referrals, so “so we’re pulling stuff like what number of millimeters was the stone on the suitable here?” Steinle describes.
As for Zhang, her advice for others who dream of doing a startup, and are considering using YC’s matching tool, is to “just exit and take a look at,” she says. “Once you begin working with people, you’ll quickly have a great sense whether you get along. You’ll know straight away.”
