Y Combinator Talks Numbers: 842 Companies Funded To Date, 22% With Women Founders In Current Batch

Y Combinator, the startup accelerator known for being the birthplace of Dropbox, Reddit, Airbnb, Stripe, and a number of other companies, released some updated stats this morning showing just how big it’s gotten — and how diverse its current class of companies is.
Y Combinator says it has now funded 842 companies to date, and those startups have raised upwards of $3 billion in investment and have a collective market cap of more than $30 billion. There are four Y Combinator companies that are worth more than $1 billion at the moment, and 32 companies valued at more than $100 million (that figure also includes companies that have been acquired.) As my colleague Josh Constine has written, these figures mean that YC itself could currently be worth more than a billion dollars on paper.
And YC, which funds two batches of startups per year in a winter and summer cohorts, says its current winter 2015 batch is its largest yet, with 114 companies. This class also has a more diverse mix of founders than we’ve seen in the past: 21.9 percent of startups in winter 2015’s YC class have a female founder, 7.9 percent have a black founder, and 5.2 percent have a Hispanic founder, according to YC. [Note: These stats have been updated, as YC released an update to its initial figures this morning. The initial numbers here were 23 percent female founders, 8 percent black founders, and 5.3 percent Hispanic founders. I’m told the changes were due to the class’ makeup shifting slightly in recent days.]

There is more diversity on the age front as well in YC’s winter 2015 batch, with the youngest founder in the class being 20 and the oldest at age 66. That makes for an average age of 30.27, and median age of 29 — which means it might be time to put the old stereotype of the “best” startup founders being teenaged college students to rest for good. You can see more stats about the winter 2015 class here.
There’s still a long, long way to go for the tech industry as a whole when it comes to diversity. But if YC is an early indication of which way the industry is going, it seems to be taking small steps in a positive direction.