Everything you need to know about YC Winter 2022 Demo Day, part 1

The TechCrunch team spent today covering the first day of Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 Demo Day, which featured half of the 394 companies that plan to virtually present. Since the overall batch is bigger than ever before – with 414 companies in total – we decided to divide, conquer and create a slew of YC Demo Day trend pieces for you to parse through the cohort. It’s not all inclusive – you can check out Y Combinator’s blog for a list at your own leisure – but instead we aimed to provide signal amid the noise, and shout out out some of our favorite companies within this season’s batch as well.

Before you check out all of our coverage from Day 1, there are some broader statistics and notes about the cohort to note. The fully virtual cohort, YC’s 34th Demo Day to date, was the first group to receive Y Combinator’s new standard deal. The deal, announced in January, is a $500,000 investment across two checks for the same equity stake as before, 7%. Other firsts for the 2022 YC Demo Day batch include country representation from New Zealand, Sudan, Uganda and Costa Rica.

Despite growing its check size, geography focus and the overall size of the batch, YC’s Demo Day mostly fell on diversity. About 10% of founders in this cohort identify as women, down from 12% the batch prior. About 6% of founders in this cohort identify as Black, slightly up from 4% from the year prior, and 12% identify as LatinX, down from 15% the year prior.

Big thank you to our team – Mary Ann, Kate, Connie, Lucas, Devin, Alex, Alyssa, Amanda, Anna, Bryce, Greg, Henry and Tage – for the team work.

Okay! Without any further ado, here’s what we got into today:

TC’s YC Demo Day Favorites, part 1

The TechCrunch staff spends lots of time diving into the technologies that startups are building, the sectors they are focused on, and the parts of the world they hope to serve. As a result, each of us has a distinct perspective covering YC Demo Day.

Out of the hundreds of companies we saw today, which stood out the most to TechCrunch staffers? Read on here!

India Startups at YC Demo Day

More than 191 companies in India have been funded through YC accelerator with nearly half of those companies accepted in the last 12 months. This year’s batch of YC Demo Day companies plan to tackle a diverse range of challenges within tech, but appear concentrated mostly within the financial services sector. Think ‘buy now, pay later’ pitches, savings-focused neobanks and, of course, bitcoin bets. It’s a contrast from prior showings, in which most of India’s YC startups fell into the B2B services category.

Here’s the full list of the startups based out of India in the Winter 2022 batch.

Fintech YC Demo Day batch

There are 35 fintech companies this year at YC Demo Day, just over double the amount of the 2021 winter batch and up from 18 in the summer program, according to the organization’s directory. We’ve listed each startup presented with thoughts about the broader problem each is trying to solve. What you’ll notice about this year’s cohort is the prevalence of companies from Nigeria, Indonesia and Argentina.

Here’s the list of fintech startups presented at YC Demo Day 2022.

Africa Startups at YC Demo Day

The U.S. has the most representation at YC Demo Day W2022. India, with 32 startups, is the second-largest demographic represented in this new batch, while Nigeria is third, having delivered a total of 18 startups. This is the first time an African country is appearing in the top three. Africa as a whole has 24 startups in this new batch, a record besting S21’s 15.

Read the list, in alphabetical order, on the batch of African startups at YC W22 here.

Competitive startups in the same YC batch

YC seems to be actively leaning into startups that are roughly the same age, operating in the same countries and targeting exactly the same opportunity with nearly identical business models. While similar types of companies within a class had grown inescapable as YC’s class sizes have ballooned, a kind of sameness is more apparent than ever with it latest batch of 400 startups. In fact, it’s beginning to look like the plan here is to back as many nascent rival teams as possible — then let them duke it out.

We’ve rounded up some of the startups that seem to us to overlap within this YC Demo Day W22 batch. Read our coverage here.