Y Combinator is famous in Silicon Valley for many reasons, but there's one service that's secretly one of its most powerful. It's an 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’ve met on the YC co-founder matching platform That’s all.” Tweeted Seed Investor Nikhil Basu Trivedi. (Bookface refers to YC's famous online collection of his how-to advice on startups for program participants.)
Recent Y Combinator graduate Hona is one example, but its founder's “meet-cute” story is a little more exciting than just using the tool.
Hona is a GenAI medical records startup. It integrates with multiple electronic record systems to summarize a patient's medical record and help physicians prepare for patient visits.
It was originally founded by two friends, Daniel Josep and Adam Steinle, who had known each other since middle school. They reunited after graduating from college and each had early careers in technology and biotechnology. Mr. Steinle was a biomedical engineer, a Goldman banker, and a leading technology product manager at Facebook. Yoesep was a scientist at a biotech startup that had just been acquired. While they were home for Thanksgiving, they were hanging out with some high school friends and talking about wanting to start a startup, and the idea for Hona came to them. Although neither of them were doctors themselves, both had family members who were doctors or healthcare professionals, and they quickly settled on the idea of using AI to help doctors summarize patient data.
We knew we needed an AI specialist co-founder, so we signed up to Y Combinator's co-founder matching platform. They found a woman named Shuying Zhang. She also wanted to run a startup in the healthcare and AI field, so she signed up for the service. Zhang's background combines biomedical engineering and software development, most recently at Google where she worked on AI and before that at Amazon.
What happened next was a process similar to Tinder for the co-founders.
Yoesep and Steinle, like Zhang, swiped through profiles on the matching tool. They each held several meetings with potential co-founders. When Mr. Zhang met his Mr. Yoesep and his Mr. Steinle, they hit it off immediately, and the longtime friends offered Mr. Zhang his full share of his one-third of the company. I offered to do it.
“We literally met and now, about three weeks later, we're both unemployed and trying to build this,” Steinle told TechCrunch.
They met at Y Combinator, and with their backgrounds in technology, they were exactly the type of startups that were guaranteed to get into the competitive program. They immediately applied to YC for his 2023 summer batch.
And they were immediately rejected.
So they decided to build a prototype themselves, show it to their physician network, get solid reviews, and raise a small seed round.
About four months later, they applied again to YC for winter 2024 and were accepted. One of the reasons they survived the second time around, Josep recalled, was because they never pivoted or pivoted, to use a Silicon Valley cliché. Another reason, she said, was “our energy during the interview showed that we had become close and that we enjoyed working together.”
Then things started for them. Physicians from Duke University and Harvard University have agreed to test the product and write a white paper to be released later this month. Several well-known angels from the technology and biotech world invested. And by the time Hona graduated from his YC and did his famous Demo Day, General Catalyst (which pursues medical technology seriously enough to acquire medical systems), Samsung, Rebel Fund (founded by Reddit co. He had already raised a $3 million seed round from – Founder Steve Huffman and Cruise Co-Founder Daniel Kang) and Ventures in 1984.
The future for Hona is still difficult. AI for medical transcription is an increasingly crowded field. Major cloud providers such as Google and Amazon offer such tools, and dozens of startups are also working on them.
But Steinle said Hona will compete in its “highly customizable” ability to search medical records for the specific data that a particular doctor needs before seeing a patient. A cardiologist will get a different overview than a nephrologist. For example, the upcoming white paper is about introducing kidney stones, so we're looking at things like, “So, how many millimeters was the stone on the right here?'' Steinle explains.
As for Chan, his advice to people who are dreaming of starting a startup and are considering using YC's matching tools is to “just go out and try it.” “When you start working with people, you quickly find out if you're going to get along. You'll know right away.”