Y Combinator is famous in Silicon Valley for many reasons, but there is one service that has quietly grow to be one of the strongest: its online founder matching tool.
“I think this is the most valuable digital product YC has built (i.e. more valuable than Bookface, etc.). It’s amazing how many founders I meet who met on YC’s co-founder matching platform.” tweeted seed investor Nikhil Basu Trivedi. (Bookface refers to YC’s famous online collection of startup advice for program participants.)
Recent Y Combinator graduate Hona is an example, although the charming story of its founders is a bit more exciting than simply using the tool.
Hona is a GenAI medical registration startup. It integrates with multiple electronic record systems and then summarizes a patient’s medical record, helping doctors prepare for a patient’s visit.
It was founded by two friends who have known each other since middle school, Danielle Yoesep and Adam Steinle. They met again after graduating from college and pursuing careers in the technology and biotechnology industries. Steinle was a biomedical engineer, a Goldman banker and a Big Tech product manager at Facebook. Yoesep was a scientist at a newly acquired biotech startup. Back home for Thanksgiving, they were hanging out with highschool friends and talking about wanting to begin a startup when the idea for Hona got here up. Although neither of them is a doctor themselves, they each had members of the family who are doctors or work in healthcare, and they soon got here up with an idea: AI helps doctors summarize patient data.
They knew they needed a co-founder specializing in artificial intelligence, so they signed up with Y Combinator Co-founder of the matching platform. They found one in Shuying Zhang, who also knew she wanted to begin a startup, something in the field of healthcare and artificial intelligence, and signed up for the service. Zhang has a background in biomedical engineering and software development, most recently working on artificial intelligence at Google and previously at Amazon.
What followed was a process that sounds a bit like Tinder to the co-founders.
Yoesep and Steinle viewed profiles in the matching tool, as did Zhang. In each of them, several social meetings with potential co-founders were held. When Zhang met with Yoesep and Steinle, they immediately hit it off so well that the longtime friends offered Zhang a full one-third stake in the company.
“We literally met and about three weeks later we’re unemployed trying to build it,” Steinle told TechCrunch.
They met at Y Combinator, and their background in technology was exactly the style of startup that will surely be accepted into a competitive program. They immediately applied to YC for the summer 2023 batch.
And They were immediately rejected.
So they began working on their very own, building a prototype, showing it to their network of doctors, gaining solid reviews, and raising a small seed round.
About 4 months later, they reapplied to YC for the 2024 winter batch and were accepted. Yoesep recalls that one of the reasons they got in a second time was because they never modified direction or modified direction, to make use of a clichéd Silicon Valley phrase. Another reason was “bbecause of our dynamics during the interview, which showed that we have grow to be closer and enjoy working together,” she said.
Then the whole lot began cooking for them. Doctors from Duke and Harvard agreed to check the product and write a white paper to be published later this month. Several angels known in the world of technology and biotechnology invested. By the time Hona graduated from YC and attended the famous Demo Day, she had already raised a $3 million seed round from General Catalyst (which is so serious about health tech that it bought a hospital system), Samsung, Rebel Fund (founded by Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman and Cruise co-founder Daniel Kan), Allegis Capital and 1984 Ventures.
Hona still has a tough road ahead of her. Artificial intelligence in medical transcription is an increasingly popular field. Large cloud service providers, e.g Google and Amazon offer such tools AND dozens of startups are also doing this.
But Steinle says Hona will compete because it is “very customizable” to go looking medical records for specific data a specific doctor needs before seeing a patient. The cardiologist will receive a different summary than the nephrologist. For example, the upcoming white paper is about referrals for kidney stones, so “we’re pulling information like how many millimeters was the stone on the right side?” Steinle describes.
As for Zhang, her advice to others who dream of starting a startup and are considering using YC’s matching tool is “just go out and try,” she says. “When you begin working with people, you will quickly get a sense of whether you get along. You’ll know straight away.”