YC index S22

YC S22 vs W23 -- and which trend grew the fastest

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Y Combinator investments in the S22 batch

Last week, we took a look at the W23 batch. This week, we’re analyzing the S22 batch which took place almost a year ago.

Here is the list of investment categories from a year ago from Y Combinator.

I compared the year-old batch to the most recent batch to see what has changed and the results were crazy!

The fastest-growing trend was not AI but customer success.

In the S22 batch, only one company was building in that space (0.16% of all companies). A year later that number grew to 1.36% - a whopping 750% increase.

Crypto / Web3 is down. But that’s pretty obvious.

Same with AI being up. Shit’s trendy right now.

What I found super interesting is how fast the open source, developer tools, and collaboration categories have grown. I think the overarching trend could be remote work and the need for deeper collaboration.

What do you think? Is remote work a trend to rule them all?

PS. here is the link to all the data if you’re interested

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