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> Afaik, YC is the only seed funder-startup accelerator in the world, among thousands of other ones, that has given birth to companies worth $1 billion ore more.

Seedcamp (London) has backed 3 unicorns: Revolut [$1.7B], UiPath [$3B], and TransferWise [$1.6B], and that's just a venture firm I know off the top of my head. While these days they're closer to a first-round fund (with a similar economic deal to YC) than an accelerator, most of those were from back when they were operating in a proper accelerator model.

I suspect there are probably a few other accelerators around the world that have unicorns in their portfolio - you just don't hear about them because they're not local.

Techstars is another one (Sendgrid, Marketo, Pillpack)

I am fairly sure Marketo was not part of Techstars ?

You're right I was mistaken. Not able to edit my comment.

Twilio.

Not a clean record anymore. Passed on Sendgrid: https://www.twilio.com/press/releases/release_twilio_acquire...

Rocket Internet is a Berlin-based incubator that has given birth to Zalando, valued at $4.5 billion.

I don’t think that counts, Rocket Internet is not a traditional incubator or accelerator like YC, but rather a creator of companies.

Well, I guess it's not exactly the same, but they probably overlap in 80-90% of their tasks.

Suppose each founder owns 10% at $1b and only count the unicorns. Graduating from YC would represent $1b * 10 % * 1% = $1m of value.

Suppose that applying to YC gives you a 1% chance of graduating, this would mean that just applying represents $10k of value!

Of course it doesn't work like this, you need to apply bayesian statistics. Of the great applications almost all get accepted and of the bad applications almost none do.

Here's another fun one:

The _average_ Y Combinator company is worth ~100M [1]

The _median_ Y Combinator company, however, is worth closer to $0 (the majority of YC companies don't get to a Series A).

This just highlights how counter-intuitive power-law distributions are.

[1] Calculation:

Discard pre YC'17 companies for the purposes of this calculation, as these are still too early stage for meaningful analysis. Brex, Faire and Atrium are the only YC '17 or later on this list.

Numerator: The top 100 companies have a combined valuation of ~$110B, according to this list.

Denominator: There were 1,400 YC companies as of Summer '17 according to https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-summer-2017-stats/. Removing S17 and W17 gives about 1,100 companies prior to '17

Fun! Rare to see the median go all the way to zero but that is the case for startups.

You can see that on a class-by-class basis by digging into funding data per class here: https://seed-db.com/accelerators/view?acceleratorid=1011 (click on the "+" to expand each class)

In the most successful class (AirBnB in W09), the majority of companies went to $0. In the most successful recent class (W14), the median startup raised a seed round but nothing else in four years.

> At least until three years ago, it hasn't passed funding on a single billion dollar company (1).

It also has invested in more than 1200 companies, more than any other seed investor that I'm aware of.