Y Combinator Backs Former ‘Housing’ Cofounder’s Smart SMS App — Kyte.ai

US-based startup incubator Y Combinator has invested in Kyte.ai, a Mumbai-based smart SMS app, as part of its summer cohort 2018. Y Combinator (YC) invests $120K in startups for a 7% equity across two batches every year.

Kyte.ai specialises in blocking spam and automatically organises the user’s inbox. It was launched in 2018 by Ravish Naresh, the former co-founder of Housing, a Mumbai-based real estate search portal.

“Kyte is attacking a problem that we don’t see in the US, but is prominent in India. We are excited to work with them because they have a strong, technical founding team with great product design instincts,” said Tim Brady, partner, Y Combinator.

Kyte comes with a number of intelligent features such as an inbuilt spam blocker which is updated in real time. Users are only notified about important updates such as OTP, online transactions, travel bookings, and banking alerts.

It further gives users an easy option of carrying out an SMS-backup and restore. Kyte also comes with easy-to-use banking APIs of all important banks in India. Users can easily perform balance checks, fetch mini statements, change ATM pins, and do a lot more by just sending an SMS.

“It is intended for the Indian market where SMS is the primary mode of communication for finance and commerce transactions and 60% of messages are spam. SMS alerts usage in India has exploded over the last three years and spam remains an unsolved problem,” said Ravish.

The company claims to have crossed 100K downloads in the last two months.

Y Combinator (YC) selects startups for training and moves them to Silicon Valley. The accelerator takes care of their living expenses on the YC campus. Apart from financial aid and helping startups fine-tune their pitches, YC also help them in networking and dealing with investors and acquirers.

Here are some insights about the startup incubator:

• YC has funded 1,585 companies since 2005, and over 3,750 founders as of March 2018
• 15 YC alumni (startups) are valued at over $1 Bn and over 70 YC alumni are valued at over $100 Mn
• 10 YC alumni are valued at over $1 Bn and 64 YC alumni are valued at over $100 Mn
• YC alumni have raised more than $13 Bn in total

Earlier, in June 2018, Gurugram-based HRtech startup Leena AI became a part of Y Combinator’s Summer Class and confirmed an investment from the company. Some other Indian startups Y Combinator has invested in past include names such as Playment, Bulk MRO, Servx, WiFi Dubba, Supr Daily, Dost Education, Credy, and DocTalk, among others.

[This development was reported by TOI.]