YC quietly doubled - from ~500 startups a year to ~980

When YC moved to quarterly batches, the message was that total volume would hold and each batch would simply be half the size. An investor whose fund backs only YC companies kept the count anyway.

- The series: S24 248, F24 94, W25 167, Sp25 143, S25 166, F25 146, W26 199, Sp26 196
- S26 sits at 235 with three weeks still to run before Demo Day
- Per-batch size is back where it started, except there are now four batches a year instead of two
- At $500K a company that is roughly $500M of YC checks annually

Worth a read if the YC stamp is part of your fundraising story, because the same badge now belongs to twice as many companies. Fair warning on sourcing: this is a YC-focused investor counting his own deal flow, not YC publishing its numbers.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeffheitzman_y-combinator-never-said-theyd-double-annual-activity-7495932666278490112-Cmp9

📎 Read also:
→ Founder Collective scored the 500 biggest exits since 2000
→ 105 YC founders now work at OpenAI or Anthropic
→ Fenwick and Carta - Q1 2026 Venture Beacon on live data