A look at the 59 startups that presented at Y Combinator's Summer 2018 Demo Day 2
From yeast-grown Cannibinoids to project management software to consumer apps looking to gauge opinions on college campuses, there was quite the wide variety of spaces represented on the second day of pitches from Y Combinator's Summer 2018 class.
Context & Ripple Effects
Day two of Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch follows the 60+ startups that launched at Demo Day 1, completing a class whose spread runs from biotech-adjacent plays like Cannibinoids' yeast-grown cannabinoids to enterprise project management and consumer apps built around college campuses.
The roundup also slots into a measurable arc in TechCrunch's own coverage: second-day cohorts of 52 startups in Summer 2015 and 48 in Summer 2016 grew to 57 in 2017 and 59 here, with the following year's Summer 2019 Demo Day 2 reaching 82 companies.
First-order effects
- The 59 presenting founders now face an immediate fundraising window where investors who just screened the previous day's larger B2B-heavy slate must decide which of the two days' ~120 companies merit follow-up meetings.
- Startups in crowded categories from this slate — project management software especially — must differentiate against both their batchmates and the enterprise companies shown at Winter 2018's Demo Day.
Second-order effects
- As cohort sizes climb year over year, Y Combinator's demo days force investors to rely more heavily on batch reputation and partner signals than on individual pitch quality, raising the value of the accelerator's brand as a filter.
- Adjacent accelerators and seed funds competing for deal flow face pressure to match the volume and visibility of YC's twice-yearly showcases or cede early access to the same founders.
Third-order effects
- If the trajectory from 52 companies in 2015 toward 82 in 2019 holds, demo days stop functioning as curated pitch events and become index-style marketplaces of early-stage bets, with capital concentration shifting toward whichever intermediary can rank the flood.
- Category breadth like this batch's — synthetic biology, SaaS, consumer social — signals accelerator portfolios absorbing whatever frontier is cheap to prototype, making batch composition itself a barometer of where speculative capital is flowing.
The trend: Y Combinator's demo-day cohorts are steadily expanding, turning each batch into a larger, more diversified marketplace where the accelerator's filtering role matters as much as any single startup's pitch.