Y Combinator Partner Daniel Gross today announced that the accelerator-turned-venture-fund will offer its first “vertical” track exclusively for AI startups. YC gathers founders from different industries together in each investment cycle. The organization hosts interdisciplinary demo days and “dinners,” which are more like half-day sessions for knowledge sharing across founder teams, with big names in tech coming in to speak as well. YC even started mixing non-profits alongside for-profits in 2013.
However, the trend across accelerators and early stage funds in recent years has been to home in on a particular industry or technology type. The “accelerator VC” SOSV, runs programs for very early stage biotech-, hardware-, food-, mobile and smart city-startups; Acceleprise and AngelPad back b2b startups only; Yield Lab, Thrive and Terra are agriculture tech accelerators; while Starburst and LightSpeed Innovations work with aerospace and aviation startups. The list seems to grow every quarter.
The new “YC AI” track will include admitted startups along with all the others. The organization isn’t ready to break with its intersectional, some would say “generalist,”…