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Y Combinator
Y Combinator, LLC (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator and venture capital firm launched in March 2005 which has been used to launch more than 5,000 companies. The accelerator program started in Boston and Mountain View, California, Mountain View, expanded to San Francisco in 2019, and was entirely online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies started via Y Combinator include Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise (autonomous vehicle), Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox (service), Dropbox, Instacart, Reddit, Stripe (company), Stripe, Scale AI, Deel (company), Deel, Helion Energy, and Twitch (service), Twitch. History Founded in 2005 by Paul Graham (programmer), Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Robert Tappan Morris, and Trevor Blackwell, Y Combinator (YC) initiated operations with concurrent programs in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Mountain View, California. However, operational complexities arising from managing two programs prompted a consolidation in January 2009, resulting in the cl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Privately Held Company
A privately held company (or simply a private company) is a company whose Stock, shares and related rights or obligations are not offered for public subscription or publicly negotiated in their respective listed markets. Instead, the Private equity, company's stock is offered, owned, traded or exchanged privately, also known as "over-the-counter (finance), over-the-counter". Related terms are unlisted organisation, unquoted company and private equity. Private companies are often less well-known than their public company, publicly traded counterparts but still have major importance in the world's economy. For example, in 2008, the 441 list of largest private non-governmental companies by revenue, largest private companies in the United States accounted for $1.8 trillion in revenues and employed 6.2 million people, according to ''Forbes''. In general, all companies that are not owned by the government are classified as private enterprises. This definition encompasses both publ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cruise (autonomous Vehicle)
Cruise LLC was an American self-driving car company that became a subsidiary of General Motors, headquartered in San Francisco, California. Founded in 2013 by Kyle Vogt and Dan Kan (executive), Dan Kan, Cruise tested and developed autonomous car technology. The company was acquired by General Motors in 2016, and operated as a largely autonomous subsidiary, focusing on producing a fleet of driverless taxis. Following a series of incidents, it suspended operations in October 2023, and Kyle Vogt resigned as CEO in November 2023. The company began returning its vehicles to public roads in May 2024. In December 2024, GM stopped funding Cruise. Work on autonomous vehicles was to be incorporated into development of advanced driver assistance systems for personal vehicles, no longer funding autonomous taxis. History Cruise initially focused on developing direct-to-consumer kits to retrofit vehicles with limited self-driving capabilities. The earlier generation of Cruise technology, RP ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
SV Angel
SV Angel Management LLC (SVA) is an American venture capital firm based in San Francisco, California. The firm focuses on investments related to the AI, software and IT sectors. Background Until mid-2009, Ron Conway made most of his investments through Baseline Ventures. He and David Lee launched SVA in 2009 that focused on seed funding. Its first fund raised $10 million. Lee was in attendance at the super angels meeting that sparked Angelgate in September 2010. Conway wrote a letter condemning the group and citing disappointment Lee was in attendance. He stated SVA has always been a friend of entrepreneurs and focuses its business to help them. In January 2011, it was reported that SVA would partner with DST Global to launch the Start fund which would be managed by Lee. It would invest in every single Y Combinator startup with an offer of $150,000 in convertible debt. In May 2012, Conway stated that SVA was Lee's fund and that he had turned over control to him This ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yuri Milner
Yuri Borisovich (Bentsionovich) Milner (, ; born 11 November 1961) is a Soviet-born Israeli entrepreneur, investor, physicist and scientist. He is a co-founder and former chairperson of internet company Mail.Ru Group (later VK), and a founder of investment firm DST Global. Through DST Global, Milner is an investor in Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Spotify, Byju's, Flipkart, Wish, JD, Alibaba, Nu Bank, and many other enterprises. In 2012, Milner's personal investments included a stake in 23andMe, Habito, and Planet Labs. In 2017, he also had a minority stake in a real estate investments startup, Cadre. Early life Born into a Jewish family on 11 November 1961, in Moscow, Yuri Milner was the second child of Soviet intellectuals. His father, Bentsion Zakharovitch Milner, was Chief Deputy Director at the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences and was active in management and organization. Betty Iosifovna Milner, Yuri's mother, worked at Moscow's state-run viro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital Operations, LLC is an American venture capital firm headquartered in Menlo Park, California, specializing in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. the firm had approximately US$85 billion in assets under management. Sequoia is an umbrella brand for three regionally focused venture entities: Sequoia Capital Operations on Europe and United States, Peak XV Partners on India and Southeast Asia, and HongShan on China. Notable successful investments made by the firm include Apple, ByteDance, and Cisco. History Sequoia was founded by Don Valentine in 1972 in Menlo Park, California, at a time when the state's venture capital industry was just beginning to develop. Sequoia formed its first venture capital fund in 1974, and was an early investor in Atari the next year. In 1978, Sequoia became one of the first investors in Apple. Partners Doug Leone and Michael Moritz assumed leadership of the firm in 199 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It is a suburb in the Greater Boston metropolitan area, located directly across the Charles River from Boston. The city's population as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the most populous city in the county, the List of municipalities in Massachusetts, fourth-largest in Massachusetts behind Boston, Worcester, Massachusetts, Worcester, and Springfield, Massachusetts, Springfield, and List of cities in New England by population, ninth-most populous in New England. The city was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England, which was an important center of the Puritans, Puritan theology that was embraced by the town's founders. Harvard University, an Ivy League university founded in Cambridge in 1636, is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Lesley University, and Hult Inte ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Twitch (service)
Twitch is an American video live-streaming service popular in video game live streaming, video games, including broadcasts of esports competitions. It also offers music broadcasts, creative content, and "in real life" streams. Twitch is operated by Twitch Interactive, a subsidiary of Amazon (company), Amazon. It was introduced in June 2011 as a spin-off of the general-interest streaming platform Justin.tv. Content on the site can be viewed either live or via video on demand. The games shown on Twitch's homepage are listed according to audience preference and include genres such as real-time strategy games, fighting games, racing games, and first-person shooters. The popularity of Twitch eclipsed that of Justin.tv. In October 2013, the website had 45 million unique viewers, and by February 2014, it was considered the fourth-largest source of peak Internet traffic in the United States. At the same time, Justin.tv's parent company was re-branded as Twitch Interactive to represen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Helion Energy
Helion Energy, Inc. is an American fusion research company, located in Everett, Washington. They are developing a magneto-inertial fusion technology to produce helium-3 and fusion power via aneutronic fusion, which could produce low-cost clean electric energy using a fuel that can be derived exclusively from water. History The company was founded in 2013 by David Kirtley, John Slough, Chris Pihl, and George Votroubek. The management team won the 2013 National Cleantech Open Energy Generation competition and awards at the 2014 ARPA-E Future Energy Startup competition, were members of the 2014 Y Combinator program, and were awarded a 2015 ARPA-E ALPHA contract, "Staged Magnetic Compression of FRC Targets to Fusion Conditions". In 2022, the company was one of five finalists for the 2022 ''GeekWire'' Awards for innovation of the year, specifically for fusion energy start up category. In 2023, the company was one of five finalists for the 2023 ''GeekWire'' Best workplaces of t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Deel (company)
Deel, Inc. is an American payroll and human resources company based in San Francisco, California. The company provides hiring, payments, and workforce management services for companies hiring international employees and contractors. The company was founded in 2019 by Alex Bouaziz, Shuo Wang, and Ofer Simon. History Deel was founded in 2019 by Alex Bouaziz, Shuo Wang, and Ofer Simon. Bouaziz and Wang met while studying at MIT in 2013. The founders launched Deel after encountering difficulty hiring international workers for their previous ventures. The company develops a platform for hiring, paying, and managing remote workers. Deel hires employees through their own local entity on a company's behalf, acting as the employer of record and managing compliance with employment laws in each country. This service includes managing benefits including health insurance, equity, tax advice and employee perks. Deel currently owns around 150 entities globally and manages in-house, in-country ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scale AI
Scale AI, Inc. is an American data annotation company based in San Francisco, California. It provides data labeling and model evaluation services to develop applications for artificial intelligence. The company’s research arm, the Safety, Evaluation and Alignment Lab, focuses on evaluating and aligning large language models (LLMs), including through initiatives such as Humanity's Last Exam, a benchmark designed to assess advanced AI systems on alignment, reasoning, and safety. Scale AI outsources data labeling through its subsidiaries, Remotasks, which focuses on computer vision and autonomous vehicles, and Outlier, which focuses on data annotation for LLMs. Scale AI's customers in the commercial sector include Etsy, General Motors, OpenAI, PayPal, Pinterest, Samsung, Toyota, and Uber. The company also directly works with world governments, including the United States on multiple military-related projects, and with Qatar to improve the efficiency of its social programs. In ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stripe (company)
Stripe, Inc. is an Irish-American multinational financial services and software as a service (SaaS) company dual-headquartered in South San Francisco, California, United States, and Dublin, Ireland. The company primarily offers payment-processing software and application programming interfaces for e-commerce websites and mobile applications. Stripe is the largest privately-owned fintech company with a valuation of about $91billion and over $1.4trillion in payment volume processed in 2024. History Irish entrepreneur brothers John and Patrick Collison founded Stripe in Palo Alto, California, in 2010, and serve as the company's president and CEO, respectively. In 2011 the company received a $2million investment, including contributions from Elon Musk, PayPal founder Peter Thiel, Irish entrepreneur Liam Casey, and venture capital firms Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and SV Angel. In March 2013, Stripe made its first acquisition, Kickoff, a chat and task-ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reddit
Reddit ( ) is an American Proprietary software, proprietary social news news aggregator, aggregation and Internet forum, forum Social media, social media platform. Registered users (commonly referred to as "redditors") submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images, and videos, which are then voted up or down ("upvoted" or "downvoted") by other members. Posts are organized by subject into user-created boards called "subreddits". Submissions with more upvotes appear towards the top of their subreddit and, if they receive enough upvotes, ultimately on the site's front page. Reddit administrators moderate the communities. Moderation is also conducted by community-specific moderators, who are unpaid volunteers. It is operated by Reddit, Inc., based in San Francisco. As of February 2025, Reddit is the List of most-visited websites, ninth-most-visited website in the world. According to data provided by Similarweb, 51.75% of the website traffic comes from the United St ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
