Y Combinator Has Funded 5,668 Startups. Here’s How an IIT Student Gets Into One.

Y Combinator has now funded 5,668 companies, which have produced 82 unicorns and 17 IPOs, and since 2024 it has run four batches a year instead of two. That structural change matters more to an Indian student than any of the valuation numbers: it means several hundred newly funded, understaffed startups appear every quarter, each with more work than engineers. This is the guide to getting inside one of them from a hostel room in Kanpur, Warangal or Hyderabad.

Key takeaways

• YC now funds roughly a thousand startups a year across four batches, so the “just funded and hiring” window opens every quarter, not twice a year.
• YC companies are small teams that hire on demonstrated ability — the founder reading your email is usually the person who would review your code.
• LeetCode is the Big Tech gate, not the startup gate: a majority of recently founded AI-native startups have cut or downgraded algorithm puzzles in favour of real work.
• The asks that work are small and scoped — “give me one ticket and a week” beats “please consider my application” every time.

Why a YC startup is the most reachable US employer for a 2nd-year student

Big Tech is the wrong target and the numbers say so plainly: SignalFire’s State of Talent report found new graduates are down to about 7% of Big Tech hires, more than 50% below 2019. Those companies have campus programmes, structured pipelines and visa-shaped hiring. A twelve-person YC startup has none of that. It has a founder with a roadmap that is too long, a codebase that needs unglamorous work done, and no recruiter standing between you and them. Every structural disadvantage you have as a second-year Indian student — no referral, no US degree, no work authorisation for an on-site role — matters much less to a team that already works remotely and pays contractors.

Learn the batch calendar — it is a hiring calendar

Y Combinator’s shift to four batches per year, each with a few hundred companies — the Winter 2026 batch alone contained 196 companies — turned YC hiring into a rolling event. Each batch ends in a Demo Day, after which most companies raise a seed round. A startup that has just closed funding is in the one phase where hiring is urgent, budget exists, and process does not. That is your window. Track the current batch’s company directory on YC’s own site, note which companies match the stack you actually know, and reach out in the weeks after their Demo Day rather than at a random point in the year. Timing your email to a founder’s cash-in-the-bank moment is the cheapest advantage available to you.

What a founder screens for instead of your JEE rank

A US founder will not know what an IIT rank means, and will not spend time learning. What they can evaluate in ninety seconds is code. Reporting on 2025 technical hiring found that 62% of AI-native startups founded in the previous 24 months had eliminated LeetCode-style questions or sharply reduced their weight, replacing them with take-home projects and real tasks — and that 78% of developers say hiring assessments do not align with real-world work. Small teams have quietly agreed with them. The context helps you too: GitHub’s Octoverse found India now has the world’s largest open-source contributor base, so a US engineering lead reviewing your pull request is doing something entirely routine. Build the artefacts they can read: a GitHub profile that reads like evidence and a merged PR in a project people use.

The eight-week plan to a YC startup internship

1. Weeks 1–3: build one thing that runs. A deployed project with real users, however few, plus two or three merged pull requests in an active repository. Without this, nothing below works.
2. Week 4: shortlist 25 companies, not 250. Filter the current and previous YC batch directory by stack and problem space. Seed-stage, small team, technology you have actually shipped in.
3. Week 4: use the product before you write. Sign up, find one genuine bug or rough edge, and screenshot it. This single step separates you from every mass-mailed application a founder receives.
4. Week 5: send six-sentence emails. Who you are, one proof link, the specific thing you noticed in their product, your IST overlap stated in their timezone, and a small ask. Nothing else. Details in our cold email guide.
5. Week 6: ask for a ticket, not a job. “Give me one well-defined issue and a week, unpaid if you prefer, and judge the PR” is an easy yes. “Do you have internships?” is an easy delete.
6. Week 6: follow up once, seven days later. One short nudge on the same thread. Founders miss email; they rarely resent a polite second message.
7. Weeks 7–8: ship the trial like an employee. Clarify scope in writing, deliver early, write a PR description a stranger could review, and post a short daily update. This is the behaviour that converts a trial into a paid role.
8. Handle the contract basics without friction. A short contractor agreement covering scope, hourly rate and IP, one invoice a month, payment via a service like Wise. Rates are always set by the employer — your job is to make saying yes easy.

Where Tierones fits

Everything above works cold. It works considerably better when the founder already trusts that you are who you say you are. Tierones verifies that you are a real student at an IIT, NIT or IIIT, and your Tier Rank turns commits, reviews and shipped projects into a signal a US founder can read without knowing anything about Indian engineering colleges. Startups arrive at the network already intending to hire remotely. The students matched first are the ones who show up with the proof already built — which is why the eight weeks above are worth starting this week rather than in final year.

FAQ

Do YC startups hire interns from India?

Many do, though rarely through a formal internship programme. YC companies are small teams — often two to ten engineers — that hire whoever can demonstrably do the work, and many are distributed by default. For a student in India the route in is a direct, specific email to a founder with proof of work attached, not an application form.

When is the best time to contact a YC startup?

The weeks right after a batch’s Demo Day are the highest-intent window. A company that has just raised is staffing up and has more work than people, which is exactly the condition that makes a founder say yes to a scoped trial task. Since 2024 YC has run four batches a year rather than two, so that window now comes around roughly every quarter.

Do I need to grind LeetCode to get an internship at a YC startup?

Far less than you would for Big Tech. Reporting on 2025 hiring found a majority of recently founded AI-native startups have cut LeetCode-style questions or sharply reduced their weight, favouring take-home work and real tasks. A small team wants evidence you can ship a feature in their codebase — a merged pull request is that evidence.

Building in second year at an IIT, NIT or IIIT? Tierones is an invite-only network where verified students get matched to startups that hire on proof of work — request an invite with your .ac.in email and your GitHub.