The 10 YC Companies (W18) I'd Invest In
By: Alex Mitchell
Tags: Computer Science, Tech, Investing, Startup, API

YC keeps getting bigger and bigger. There were 128 companies (!) in the Winter class. These companies presented to YC partners and potential investors on 3/19 and 3/20/18.

The Top 10 Companies I’d Invest In

**Credit to TechCrunch for their descriptions of the companies below**

Juni Learning — Teach Children Computer Science

TechCrunch Description: Juni is an online education program for kids that is targeting the $9 billion after-school market. The idea is to start with teaching kids computer science in a virtual, one-on-one setting by pairing them with tutors.

It charges $250 per month for once-a-week classes. Juni says it’s grown 25 percent month over month in the last six months. The company also says it’s profitable, with a 95 percent monthly renewal rate. Without adequate computer science courses in schools, and the skills becoming clearly critical future employment, Juni could educate the next generation of programmers.

Why I Would Invest: There are currently over 260k open technology jobs worth $21B (in the US alone). These numbers are guaranteed to grow rapidly in the coming years.

Early education is one of the ways to help fill this gap and Juni has positioned themselves well here. Traditional schools haven’t moved fast enough to teach computer science and Juni could be the private solution that our country and our world needs to teach computer science at scale.

2. Veriff — Online Identity Verification

TechCrunch Description: Veriff wants to be Stripe for online identity verification, handling the processing of drivers licenses, passports, and IDs for websites. They did $60k in revenue in February, and are currently profitable. They charge ~$1 per verification.

Why I Would Invest: Checkr proved that a “simple” background checking API has a massive value to the gig-economy (the company is valued >$1B currently).

Veriff, while young, offers a similar “simple” value proposition: instant verification of identity online and a per verification charge. Their potential customer base is huge and their presumably very high margins are attractive too!

3. Onderful — Dental Insurance Verification API

TechCrunch Description: Onederful is an API for dental insurance.

Onederful says dentists offices lose $6B in revenue per year due to insurance claim problems, and spend $3 billion a year on high friction claim verification. Onederful’s API integrates with 240 insurance providers to rapidly and reliably verify a patient’s insurance and make sure the dentist gets paid.

Onederful doesn’t have to sell dentist by dentist, and instead is developing partnerships with the top dentist software suites for distribution.

Why I Would Invest: How many times have you been at a dentist or a doctor office and the receptionist spends 15–30 minutes on the phone with your insurance company’s IVR only to ultimately fail to get the information they need?

This leads to the dentist/doctor taking a chance that your insurance is valid, and they ultimately lose $6B/year on invalid claims.

Onederful provides instant, frictionless, insurance verification for dentist offices to save time and avoid lost revenue. I’m a big fan of their distribution strategy: focusing on the top dental software suites instead of going door-to-door. While they will sacrifice some margin with this approach, they’ll be able to scale much faster.

4. HelloVerify — Background Checks in India

Don’t judge HelloVerify by their website!

TechCrunch Description: HelloVerify is doing online instant background checks in India where the the government has recently announced it will begin digitizing all personal records.

The startup has lined itself up to be among the first to take advantage of this legislation. The company currently has $3 million in annual revenue and has closed $1 million in orders in the past 60 days. The company’s early customers include Accenture, Infosys and Cognizant.

Why I Would Invest: Are you starting to see a theme with a few of the companies I would invest in? HelloVerify takes the Checkr model to India.

With India’s rapid digitization, HelloVerify is well-positioned to be the interface between companies in India and government managed personal records. Given India’s massive population and rapidly growing skilled workforce, the opportunity here for HelloVerify is huge.

5. NextGenT — Certificate Programs for IT Positions

TechCrunch Description: Bootcamps became insanely popular in the mid 2010s, but there’s been a big shakeout since then — and NexGenT hopes to take the fundamentals of getting an engineer production ready, but with a different approach. Rather than try to have someone ready to be a full-scale developer in 3 months, NexGenT focuses on just certificate programs to get people ready to be network engineers. The process is longer, but hopefully more robust as well.

Why I Would Invest: NexGenT keeps the IT career training simpler. Instead of promising that you’ll be fullstack in 8 weeks (not possible), they focus on entry level technical careers that are still very in demand, but much more achievable. These careers also tend to have strong certificate programs that are well recognized and accepted by Fortune 500 companies.

I’m interested to learn more about the cost/payment structure for NexGenT courses and would want to learn more about their job placement success rate before investing.