Dost Education, Credy And DocTalk – Get Into Y Combinator’s New Winter 2017 Batch

In March 2017, Y Combinator announced its W’17 batch with five Indian companies – Playment, Bulk MRO, Servx, WiFi Dubba,and Supr daily.

Three more Indian startups have been included in the list. This includes Dost Education, Credy and DocTalk.

The accelerator invests $120K in startups for a 7% equity stake in the selected startups. It normally takes in a large number of startups (107 last year) and has funded over 1,464 startups since 2005. The selected startups then move to Silicon Valley for three months, where it also helps them pitch to investors.

Here is a brief overview of the selected three:

Dost Education

Dost is an evidence-based approach that empowers parents to provide effective early learning experiences for their children. There are over 750 Mn illiterate adults in the world who cannot take part in their child’s education while 250 Mn children cannot read/write even when promoted to fifth grade. Dost helps these parents in preparing their wards for kindergarten. One can dial a number and sign up to receive child development tips. They can learn activities and can spend increased quality time with their children, thereby preparing them early on for academic education.

It costs parents $0.91 a month, and currently needs startup capital to build out its lesson plan and infrastructure.

Credy

Credy is an online portal where one can apply for instant personal loans at reasonable rates. The interest rates range from 12% to 30% per annum. Also, the applicant receives a new CIBIL report and Credy reimburses the fees when a loan is received. For availing a loan,a user needs to sign up and upload the required financial documents. Verification is done via Aadhaar number, eliminated the need for attested copies and photographs and the loan agreement is signed digitally. It takes 24 hours for approval and 48 hours to get the money into the bank. Credy will levy a penal interest of 24% per annum on the due amount, in case of non-payment by due date. In the worst case scenario, Credy will help lenders in getting all possible legal resources for recovery of dues.

DocTalk

DocTalk is a mobile application that allows users to safely save all their medical files and history on the cloud, so that they never have to carry files again. Using the app, patients can also chat with their doctors and get prescriptions on-the-go. The idea is to work on an AI-based, on-demand virtual assistant application to simplify the Indian healthcare ecosystem. As Co-founder Akshat Goenka shared in a blog post on Medium, “We started reading up on the Indian healthcare ecosystem and some of our most basic assumptions were proven drastically wrong. We quickly realised that there is a great opportunity to simplify problems but the deeper we looked, the greater the problems seemed.” They are now looking forward to be more people-friendly and monetise their product.

In July 2016, co-working space Innov8, mobile-first ecommerce platform Meesho, and self-drive car rental service provider JustRide were the three Indian startups that made it into YC’s summer batch, making it by far the largest representation of Indian companies at one of Silicon Valley’s most-sought after accelerator programmes. Razorpay, ClearTax, Kisan Network, and HackerRank are some of the others Indian startups that have been funded by Y Combinator.

In September 2016, marking YC’s first visit to India, YC Partners Tim Brady and Adora Cheung also conducted the famous YC Office Hours in Delhi and Bengaluru.

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