Y Combinator to close down China unit

US-based startup enabler Y Combinator said it plans to close down the Chinese version of its program as part of a change in strategy.

Photo credit: Paul Miller

In a blog post, the Silicon Valley accelerator said it will roll back to its approach of supporting local and international startups from its headquarters. “As a result, we decided that now is not the right time to run a new, country-specific version of Y Combinator,” the company wrote.

YC China was set up in 2018 with the help of Qi Lu, who was the localized program’s founding CEO. He was also appointed as the head of YC Research, Y Combinator’s nonprofit research lab. He previously served as an executive vice president of Microsoft, leading the development of Bing, Skype, and Microsoft Office.

With the change in strategy, Qi will now be funding companies under his new program, MiraclePlus. Y Combinator also said that it will continue to support and fund interested Chinese companies, but it will do so as part of its US program.

According to a LatePost report, former Y Combinator president Sam Altman was leading investments for YC China. When Geoff Ralston took on the role after Altman stepped down, investments slowed down for the Chinese unit, as Ralston was more conservative with regards to the Asian market.

Y Combinator was founded in 2005, investing a small amount of money in a large number of startups twice a year. Successful exits by Y Combinator-backed companies include social content aggregation platform Reddit and cloud application platform Heroku.

The accelerator is also famous for counting companies like Stripe, Airbnb, Dropbox, and Twitch as alumni of its its program.

Some of its most recent investments in Southeast Asia include its participation in the US$25 million in a series A funding round of India-based accounting app Khatabook. It also joined the US$5 million seed round of Indonesian logistics startup Shipper.