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These are the top Y Combinator companies of all time, based on valuation

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In October of 2018, Y Combinator published a mega list of the top 101 companies to have gone through the accelerator, as sorted by each company’s valuation.

This morning they updated the list.

Valuation as a ranking metric has its faults, of course. It’s a measurement largely of perception; a projection of a company’s perceived potential, rather than a direct indication of how much a company is actually making at a given moment. When publishing last year’s list, YC openly admitted that “valuation is a poor way to measure a company’s value in the short term.”

But it still provides some rather interesting insights into which of YC’s 2,000+ investments have grown the most, which have held strong over time and which sectors perform the best. YC says that all of the companies that made this year’s list are each currently valued at $150 million or more, with a cumulative valuation of $155 billion.

The new “Top 101”, according to YC:

  1. Stripe
  2. Airbnb
  3. Cruise
  4. DoorDash
  5. Coinbase
  6. Instacart
  7. Dropbox
  8. Ginkgo Bioworks
  9. Gusto
  10.   Flexport
  11.   Rappi
  12.   Brex
  13.   Reddit
  14.   Gitlab
  15.   PagerDuty
  16.   Checkr
  17.   Segment
  18.   Docker
  19.   Scale
  20.   Faire
  21.   Twitch
  22.   PlanGrid
  23.   MixPanel
  24.   Amplitude
  25.   Optimizely
  26.   Boom Supersonic
  27.   Grin
  28.   Meesho
  29.   Algolia
  30.   GOAT
  31.   Zapier
  32.   MessageBird
  33.   Standard Cognition
  34.   Memebox
  35.   Embark
  36.   Helion Energy
  37.   EquipmentShare
  38.   SendBird
  39.   Rescale
  40.   GoCardless
  41.   Rigetti Computing
  42.   Razorpay
  43.   North
  44.   Relativity Space
  45.   Podium
  46.   Benchling
  47.   Ironclad
  48.   Newfront
  49.   InfluxData
  50.   Webflow
  51.   People.ai
  52.   Weebly
  53.   Xendit
  54.   Matterport
  55.   EasyPost
  56.   Sift
  57.   The Athletic
  58.   Mattermost
  59.   WePay
  60.   Vidyard
  61.   Weave
  62.   Nurx
  63.   Proxy
  64.   Heap
  65.   Payfazz
  66.   memsql
  67.   Fivetran
  68.   Rippling
  69.   Clever
  70.   Heroku
  71.   Fivestars
  72.   CoreOS
  73.   ClearTax
  74.   Quero Education
  75.   Ridecell
  76.   HelloSign
  77.   GrubMarket
  78.   Lattice
  79.   Unbabel
  80.   Athelas Inc.
  81.   Oh My Green
  82.   Lever
  83.   Atrium
  84.   Zeus
  85.   Front
  86.   Le Tote
  87.   ShipBob
  88.   Snapdocs
  89.   GitPrime
  90.   Scribd
  91.   Guesty
  92.   Axoni
  93.   Lob
  94.   Notable
  95.   Atomwise
  96.   Flutterwave
  97.   Panorama Education
  98.   FutureAdvisor
  99.   SFOX
  100.     Lambda School
  101.     ZeroDown

While the top 10 companies remain largely the same from 2018, a few of them have danced around a bit, while others have disappeared entirely. Airbnb was No. 1 last year, while Stripe was No. 2; in 2019, they’ve swapped places. Machine Zone, creators of the once wildly popular mobile game Game of War and the No. 7 company in 2018, doesn’t appear on the list at all — nor does last year’s No. 9, Zenefits. YC notes that this list isn’t necessarily exhaustive, as they “allowed alumni to opt out of being listed for any reason.”

Most of the companies on the list are at least 4 or 5 years old, which makes sense — it’s pretty uncommon for companies to hit massive, record-breaking valuations right out of the gate. There are, of course, exceptions: Grin, a Latin American scooter rental company that sits at No. 27 on this year’s list, just went through YC in Summer of 2018. Atrium, the tech-driven startup law firm founded by Twitch co-founder Justin Kan, sits at No. 83 and was part of the Winter 2018 class. ZeroDown, a company that aims to help people buy homes without a down payment, squeezed onto the list at No. 101 after launching just months ago.

The Summer 2016 batch, meanwhile, has more appearances on the list than any other group, with the one class alone accounting for 10% of the list. The oldest company on the list is Reddit, which was part of YC’s Summer 2005 class, at number 13.

Sorted by sector, B2B Software/Services just absolutely dominates YC’s Top 101, accounting for 52% of the list. The next closest sector is fintech at 15%, followed closely by consumer goods/services at 11%.

sector chart

The vast majority (71%) of the list calls the Bay Area home, with 63% of the Top 101 companies hosting their headquarters in San Francisco. Four companies on the list, meanwhile, call no one physical place home — GitLab, Zapier, Mattermost and SFOX all consider themselves primarily remote.

Want to poke around the list some more? You can find YC’s full list here.

We’ll be interviewing Y Combinator’s Michael Seibel and Ali Rowghani at Disrupt SF 2019 later today — find it at 3:15 pm on the Extra Crunch stage.

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