Meet The 12 Indian Startups In The Y Combinator’s Winter 2023 Cohort

Despite a hostile funding environment the world over, the US-based early-stage startup accelerator programme Y Combinator is back with its biannual cohort for the year 2023. Of the 282 startups that were selected in the recently unveiled winter cohort of 2023, as many as 12 Indian startups made the cut in the first batch. 

The startups will receive $500K in funding from the highly sought-after accelerator programme. The three-month-long initiative is held twice a year for early-stage ventures from around the world. 

The programme handholds these platforms by providing them with financial aid and fine-tunes the startup’s pitch deck to further scale their operations. It also helps these emerging players connect and network with prospective clients and investors.

This year, 12 homegrown startups have been selected, down by nearly half compared to the winter 2022 cohort when 21 local startups made the cut. A majority of the selected startups this year belong to the software-as-service (SaaS) domain, while two generative AI platforms have also made it to the coveted list. 

What stood out was that 11 of the selected Indian startups were either headquartered or based out of Bengaluru. Additionally, just three of the 12 selected startups had a woman cofounder. 

Y Combinator has bet on more startups in the current batch, compared to 192 last year when a global downturn triggered a chain reaction of tech rout and sordid numbers. Not much has changed for the world this year too as macroeconomic pressures and reduced consumer and business spending continue to weigh heavily on tech startups the world over.

Y Combinator also dodged a bullet after the Silicon Valley Bank crisis appeared to have financially threatened many of its portfolio startups. Most Y Combinator-backed startups have an account with SVB, which made matters worse for the accelerator but prompt action by US authorities helped Y Combinator escape unscathed. 

Through the accelerator programme, Y Combinator has so far invested in 233 Indian startups, including names like Razorpay, Groww, Meesho, Zepto, and Khatabook, among others. 

Its previous summer batch of 2022 included startups like Hiresure.ai, Landeed, Shelf, Maya Labs, Gullak Money, and EthosX, among others. 

As for this year, here’s the list of 12 Indian startups that are part of Y Combinator’s 2023 Winter cohort.

Atri Labs

 The brainchild of Darshita Chaturvedi and Shyam Swaroop, Atri Labs claims to be building a new full-stack web development framework for Python developers. A free and open-source platform, Atri Labs allows users to build visually appealing apps. 

In essence, Atri enables Python developers to do full-stack development without learning a new language. Since its launch in 2022, the company has notched up 3,900+ GitHub stars. According to the company, its platform is used by developers at social media giant Meta to build internal ML web apps. 

Codeparrot

Founded in 2022, Codeparrot is an enterprisetech platform, which offers an auto-updating test suite for backend services. Codeparrot generates test cases based on production data and even helps companies set up test environments to run these tests. 

The platform records data across microservices and then uses it to test the impact of every change before the release of the software.

Clueso

Clueso is an enterprisetech platform that deploys robotic process automation and generative AI to build auto-generated help guides for product features for SaaS products. The platform’s AI crawls through any SaaS app to generate help guides in the form of documents, videos, and an interactive tour. 

Founded in 2023 by IIT Madras Alumni Akash Anand, Neel Balar and Prajwal Prakash, the startup also helps clients flag outdated guides with every new update and directs the administrator to revamp the ones that need change.

Doctor Droid

Doctor Droid is a B2B SaaS platform that helps developers scan lengthy lines of code to detect steps of failure and understand how the code is impacting product metrics. 

It automatically monitors data to build workflow visualisation of critical product paths to help engineers set up ‘stateful alerts’ that span across multiple events. By automatically correlating product logs and metrics with product markers, the system can share insights and gives you real-time visibility of how a product is performing. 

This eventually enables a coder to pre-empt any failure state and intervene quickly at the right place. 

Based out of San Francisco, the startup was founded by Siddharth Jain and Dipesh Mittal in 2022.

Floworks

Founded in 2022 by Sudipta Biswas and Sarthak Shrivastava, Floworks helps sales personnel effectively utilise Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software from the confines of their Slack accounts.

Sales representatives can just instruct Floworks on the Slack app to send CRM updates, send emails, raise escalations and get reports, without having to go through multiple applications.

The B2B SaaS platform integrates existing CRMs with the Slack workspace of the sales team and notifies them of all critical tasks to amp up sales and reduce time lost on manually entering details on CRM software. 

Mantys 

Operating at the intersection of fintech and enterprisetech, Mantys helps SaaS platforms gather visibility into their annual run rate (ARR) cycle by helping them calculate and forecast the metrics in real-time. 

By addressing pain points such as data sitting across disparate locations and the inability to handle multi-dimensional data, Mantys helps SaaS platforms fetch actionable insights and take corrective actions faster. 

The software automates processes and helps enterprisetech companies gain a deeper look into other metrics such as contracted ARR, billed ARR, and others without going through complicated spreadsheets. 

A brainchild of Kriti Arora and Mudit Dangi, the subscription-based plug-and-play solution also provides access to many planning and analysis templates.

Magik

After facing many hurdles while integrating multiple payment methods for different geographies, Himanshu Bamoria, Mohit Kumar Jandwani and Shiv Sakhuja sat down to build a crypto platform that makes it easy for fintech to add cross-border crypto payment features. 

Magik Labs aggregates onramp providers from across the globe in more than 160 countries across 100+ countries’ payment methods. It also supports as many as 75 blockchains and 500+ cryptocurrencies.

The platform also caters to compliance requirements of fintech startups ranging from KYC to anti-money laundering aspects during the transaction. 

For the uninitiated, an onramp service allows users to exchange fiat currencies for cryptos. While most crypto transactions are complicated for reasons ranging from UI/UX to high costs, Magik comes, in between, as a bridge to help users and fintech companies deploy local payment systems to undertake transactions without worrying about compliances in different countries. 

Shyp 

Shyp is a B2B logistics platform that connects shippers and carriers in real-time to efficiently move freight and other goods. 

A shipper is a company that owns the goods and the carrier transports those items.

Shyp is a B2B logistics marketplace that allows carriers to list on the platform and then shippers can choose any transporter to move the goods. The Kolkata-based startup was founded by Shivam Bharuka and Sanchit Narang in 2022. 

ShortLoop

ShortLoop is a B2B SaaS platform that simply creates a centralised API hub with all recent API collections, dependency maps and other metrics such as API usage and behaviour.

In simple words, ShortLoops offers an API documentation platform that samples network traffic to help developers stay on top of maintaining their API collections and documentation. The startup was founded in 2022 by Deepak Thakur, Sumit Mulchandani and Vishnu Vinjam to help companies maintain API logs as they grow in scale and team size. 

SuperAPI

Founded in 2022 by Aditya Agrawal and Adithya Kavuluru, Bengaluru-based SuperAPI is a B2B SaaS platform that helps companies reduce cloud costs by making APIs cacheable. Cache helps reduce latency and returns output quickly for apps. 

By making APIs cacheable, the number of computations on a database and compute instances are reduced, making operations more streamlined and agile. 

SuperAPI operates as a separate API gateway or on top of existing caching providers and tracks the incoming API calls and database updates to keep the API cache fresh and invalidate stale data. 

Thus, only relevant portions of databases are modified and customers get a smooth experience without any latency or lag.

Qoohoo 

Qohoo is a creatortech platform that helps influencers manage and monetise their audiences across multiple platforms. 

Founded in 2021 by Aseem Gupta and Vimal Singh Rathore, Qoohoo helps creators scale their micro-content, courses and subscriptions to communities directly on WhatsApp and Telegram. 

Addressing pain points across payment, management and subscription, the platform directly reaches out to users on their messaging apps and pings them with regular notifications, building personalised landing pages and launching multiple subscription options as per users’ requirements. 

Backed by names such as Unacdemy’s Gaurav Munjal, CRED’s Kunal Shah and Snapdeal cofounders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, the startup last raised $800K in 2021. 

UpTrain AI

UpTrain AI is a B2B open-source tool that helps data scientists understand whether their machine learning (ML) models are performing as per expectation in production. The ML observability and refinement product claims to continuously improve these models over time, especially in cases where the accuracy is low. 

Founded in 2022 by Sourabh Agrawal, Vipul Gupta and Shikha Mohanty, the developer tool gives users complete visibility into their ML model’s online health via real-time dashboards and automatically checks for outliers to retrain the model for increased efficiencies.