Here are the Bay Area companies in Y Combinator's latest winter batch

It's demo day season at Y Combinator, and the Mountain View accelerator is holding another two-day virtual pitch session that starts Wednesday.

Though still a large group, there are only about 270 companies from around the world in the current cohort, according to YC's online database. That's a measurable drop from one year ago when YC invested in a record-setting 414 companies. The size of the Winter 2023 batch is more on par with its Summer 2022 batch, which had 240 companies. 

This is also the first Demo Day since Garry Tan returned to take over as CEO and president from Geoff Ralston, who stepped down at the end of 2022.

“Hayes Valley truly became Cerebral Valley this year — San Francisco will continue to play a big role in the future of technology and will continue to bring together some of the smartest minds in the world,” Tan said during open remarks at this year's Demo Day, first reported by TechCrunch. “The SF Bay Area is still a place for dreamers and doers to try their hand at their own future, and we have so much work to do.”

This year's YC batch is markedly hyper local compared to previous ones with 86% of founders living in San Francisco during the incubator period, compared to 30% last year, according to a blog post by YC.

The size of YC's cohorts has exploded over the past several years, prompting questions about whether the program has become too bloated.

A former YC founder recently wrote a blog post describing the experience as being like a "conveyer" belt. Oleksii Sidorov co-founded an e-commerce recommendation startup called Suggestr based in Singapore and went through YC's Winter 2022 program.

There was "no relationship or a sense of community" with other founders, Sidorov wrote, and being outside of the U.S. made it difficult to join calls that were scheduled at inconvenient times.

Sidorov also described the intense competition to sell software products to other startups within the YC ecosystem — "other members are already overloaded with unique offers from other YC companies," he wrote.

There's a database with useful information for founders, Sidorov wrote, but getting access to "office hours" with partners "didn't help us much" because "there are not so many of them and they’re difficult to book," he wrote, adding that the advice they got also felt "generic."

The most valuable thing founders can get out of YC's program is the publicity generated from it, he wrote, and many companies already have investors or leads lined up before Demo Day, anyways.

"Don't expect big players to reach out to you after the Demo Day. They know about you, if they haven't reached out yet it means they're not interested," Sidorov wrote.

Nonetheless, there are more than 160 startups based in the Bay Area this time around, and artificial intelligence has exploded as a category.

Across the entire cohort, 96 companies have artificial intelligence, AI or generative AI tags, according to the website. And more than 80% of those are based in the Bay Area.

The generative AI tag shows up in YC's database as far back as 2017, but the category has only recently exploded — the current batch has 54 companies identified in the category and close to two thirds of them are in the Bay Area.

Other popular categories in the current batch are developer tools, B2B software, fintech, health care and consumer.

Only 10 companies — five of which are in the Bay Area — are tagged with crypto and Web3, down more than half compared to last summer.

Click here for a complete list of all the Bay Area-based AI and generative AI companies in YC's Winter 2023 batch.

And here are some of the other local startups and their founders that you should know from this batch, organized by category (though many overlap into multiple industries):

Climate and energy

Consumer, social media and creator economy

 

Crypto/web3

Developer Tools

 

Fintech

Health care