YC Will Now Fund Nonprofits Too

YC Will Now Fund Nonprofits Too
Paul Graham
6 September 2013

We just opened applications for the winter 2014 Y Combinator batch, and we're happy to announce that there's something new this time: an application form for nonprofits. We're going to start including nonprofits in every YC batch.

We'd been thinking about this for a while. We had a hypothesis that many newly founded nonprofits could benefit from the same techniques we use to help startups. We tested this with Watsi in the Winter 2013 batch and it worked wonderfully. They did all the same things as the other startups, including present at Demo Day (which is after all a room with lots of rich people in it).

Since some people were confused when we funded Watsi, I'd better clarify that the money we're putting into the nonprofits will be a charitable donation, rather than an investment in the narrow sense. We won't have any financial interest in them.

We don't know how many nonprofits we'll fund, or what type of ideas we'll like. We like Watsi a lot, because they help people who really need help, and do it in an efficient and transparent way. But fundamentally this is an experiment, just like YC itself was at first. So we don't want to tell people too precisely what we're looking for, because we're not sure yet what we're looking for.

Note to applicants: if you visit the nonprofit application form, it will create a nonprofit application for this batch. Which means if you then go to the regular application form, you'll be editing the nonprofit application you created earlier. You can switch a nonprofit application to a regular for-profit one and back using:

https://news.ycombinator.com/change-nonprofit-status