Y Combinator reveals stats, highlights diversity

All told, Y Combinator alumni have raised over $3 billion for a combined market cap of $30 billion

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There are no shortage startup incubator and accelerators out there right now, but Y Combinator is undoubtedly one of the biggest, having funded some pretty big names in tech, including Scribd, Reddit, Airbnb, Dropbox, Disqus and Stripe, among others. That's a might impressive list right there.

But just how big it has it become? Now we know, as the accelerator has revealed that it has funded a total of 842 companies to date, according to a blog post put out on Tuesday.

That adds up to a market cap of over $30 billion, and over $3 billion raised in total. Most impressive: 32 of the companies that Y Combinator has funded are now worth over $100 million, including those that have been acquired, and four of them are worth over $1 billion.  

(While those four companies are not broken out, Dropbox is among them, having been valued at $10 billion. Stripe is worth $3.6 billion and Airbnb is worth $13 billion. So that accounts for three of them.)

For its latest class, which is labeled "Winter 2015," Y Combinator has selected a total of 114 companies (they are included in the 842 total). And, in keeping with the trend going on right now in Silicon Valley, the accelerator has decided to highlight the diversity of that group.

There are a total of 17 countries being represented, from nearly every continent: Argentina, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, France, India, Israel, Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, Thailand , Turkey, United Kingdom, Ukraine and the United States. 

The average age of the founders if 30.27, ranging from 20 years old to 66 years old.

When it comes to gender and race, Y Combinator seems to be doing just ok on the former, but has a lot of work to do on the latter. The number of companies with a female founder is 25, making up 21.93% of the 114 companies. So, that's not terrible but it's also not great.

Only 9 companies have a black founder, for 7.89%, and 6 have a Hispanic founder, for 5.26%. It seems like Y Combinator might want to think about doing better outreach to minority communities. 

Finally, it broke down the categories in which the new companies fall into. The are 20 each for B2B and Consumer, 18 biomedical, 14 marketplace companies, 13 enterprise, and 10 in developer tools. 

Diversity in tech

It's pretty telling that Y Combinator would feel the need to break out the stats on its diversity; typically we've so far only seen companies like Apple, Twitter and Google doing this. Now, it seems, it is spreading to all parts of the tech landscape.

It will be interesting to see if incubators and acclerators start putting their money where their mouth is, and actually start to try to make a difference in this regard. After all, they are the stepping stone for many of the companies that become the big players in tech.

In January, Intel announced it was investing a whopping $300 million to "build a pipeline of female and under-represented engineers and computer scientists," as well as to actively support hiring and retaining more women and under-represented minorities.

Intel also revealed its plan to fund programs that celebrate diversity, including the International Game Developers Association, the E-Sports League, the National Center for Women in Technology, the CyberSmile Foundation, the Feminist Frequency, and Rainbow PUSH.

In October, Facebook, Box and Pinterest announced that they had gotten together to launch a new mentorship program called WEST (Women Entering and Staying in Tech). The idea is to get more women interested in computer science, and to help them be prepared for the tech jobs of the future.

WEST will feature women who have technical jobs at all three companies, who will serve as one-on-one mentors. They will meet with mentees individually and as a group, in-person and online, over the course of a year. The program will officially launch in pilot mode this year.

Most recently Apple revealed that it was  partnering with the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, a non-profit that supports students enrolled in public, historically black colleges and universities (also known as HBCUs), such as North Carolina A&T State University, Howard University, and Young's alma mater Grambling State University.

It would also partner with the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT), a non-profit that help create a broader pipeline of female technology workers.

All told, Apple will be donating $50 million to these groups. And, on top of that, it will also potentially be donating to organizations that provide those in the military with technology training and specialized programs.

(Image source: ycombinator.com)