How to apply to Y Combinator: the Winter 2027 guide

Y Combinator’s Winter 2027 applications close on Monday 2 November at 8pm Pacific time. In Milan that’s 5am on Tuesday the 3rd, so for an Italian founder the real deadline is Monday night. Apply on time and YC says you’ll have a decision by 11 December.

Here’s how to apply to Y Combinator, step by step: what YC invests, the calendar, the form and the video, the interview, the honest odds, and what changes for an Italian Srl (a limited liability company). A four-week plan to the deadline closes the guide. New to startups? Start from our beginner’s map, from zero to a first round.

What is Y Combinator, and what does it invest?

Y Combinator is a San Francisco accelerator. Put simply, it puts the same standard amount into every early-stage startup it picks, then works closely with the founders for about three months. Companies join in batches. Each one ends with Demo Day, when the founders pitch to an audience of investors YC picks.

The money is the same for everyone. YC invests $500,000 through two SAFEs, short contracts that turn into shares at your first priced round, the first round that sets a price per share. The first is $125,000 on a post-money SAFE for 7% of the company, a share measured after all the SAFEs convert. The second, $375,000, is an uncapped SAFE with an MFN (most favoured nation) clause. It converts on the best terms of any SAFE you issue between around the start of the batch and the priced round, which usually means the lowest valuation cap, the ceiling on the price at which a SAFE turns into shares.

Imagine that after Demo Day you raise more SAFEs at a $20 million post-money cap. The MFN SAFE takes that cap, which works out at 1.875%, so YC would own about 8.9% once the SAFEs convert. That’s our arithmetic on an invented case. Then the priced round, and any new or bigger option pool (shares set aside for staff), dilutes YC along with you.

No milestones are attached and there are no fees. YC invests as soon as you’re accepted, without waiting for the batch to start. For a conversion worked through with numbers, read SAFE vs convertible note.

When is the next Y Combinator deadline?

In January 2025 YC announced that it now runs four batches a year, Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall, partly because AI was pushing more people to start companies. Here’s how Winter 2027 looks.

Step	Winter 2027
On-time deadline	Monday 2 November 2026, 8pm PT (5am on Tuesday 3 November in Italy)
Interviews	Mostly by video call, in November and December
Decision	By 11 December if you applied on time, usually on the day of the interview
Batch	January to March 2027, in person in San Francisco, opening with a 3-day kick-off
Late applications	Still read; most get an answer within a month, with no guarantee
Investment	$500,000, invested as soon as you’re accepted

Missed the date? Don’t sit on it until the next batch. YC’s FAQ says that if you’re ready you should just apply, because ‘we fund many companies that apply late’. Still at university? Early Decision ‘lets you apply to YC while you’re still in school and reserve your spot in a future batch’.

How to apply to Y Combinator: the form and the video

You apply online at ycombinator.com/apply. No inside contact is needed: YC calls considering all applications equally one of its core principles. The form is written answers about the company and the founders, and the best guide to it is still Paul Graham’s essay How to Apply to Y Combinator.

Graham does the sum for a reader facing 1,000 applications in ten days: about 100 a day. YC got over 27,000 for one batch in 2024. Hence his rule: ‘give it to us right in the first sentence, in the simplest possible terms.’ His bad example is ‘We are going to transform the relationship between individuals and information.’ Better to describe the product as a variant of something people know, like ‘Wikipedia, but within an organization’. Stuck on that line? Our guide to writing a startup one-liner has a method.

The most important question on the form, in Graham’s view, asks for something impressive that each founder has built or achieved, in one or two sentences. Be specific. Say you’re a founder in Turin: ‘built a booking tool that 40 restaurants pay for’ beats ‘passionate about hospitality’.

The video lasts one minute and ‘should contain nothing except the founders talking’. Start with your names. Then tell YC what you’re doing, and why. No demo and no promotional clip. No written script either: YC wants bullet points and spontaneous talk, ‘as you would to a friend’, and founders in different cities can screen-record a video call. Don’t skip it: Graham writes that YC is ‘much more likely to interview people who submit a video’.

And the people? In What We Look for in Founders (2010), Graham named five qualities: determination, flexibility, imagination, naughtiness and friendship between the founders. The FAQ adds a practical test, a team with the skills to build the product itself. If you have traction, proof that people want what you make, show it week by week: in 2012 Graham put a good growth rate during YC at 5% to 7% a week.

What happens next: the interview and the odds

A good application earns an interview. For Winter 2027 most will be video calls in November and December, and YC ‘typically’ decides the same day. Its interview guide says the format is designed so ‘you don’t need to do much preparation’. Know your numbers anyway, and practise explaining the company to a stranger. No invitation? YC gives no feedback on applications that don’t reach the interview.

Now the honest part. The latest figures on YC’s batch statistics page are for Winter 2024: over 27,000 applications and 260 companies funded, under 1%. That predates the switch to four batches, so take it as an order of magnitude. Two other YC numbers help. About half the companies in a typical batch applied more than once. And on average 40% of the companies YC funds in each batch are just an idea, while many others have already raised over $1 million.

Just an idea for now? A seven-day test of your startup idea gives you something real to write in the progress answers.

Can Italian and European founders apply to YC?

Yes, and Italians have been doing it for over a decade. Eight Sleep, the New York sleep-tech company co-founded by Italians Matteo Franceschetti and Massimo Andreasi Bassi, went through YC in Summer 2015. In June 2025 Vento, Exor Ventures’ operating arm in Italy, counted six companies with Italian founders in YC’s spring batch and said it had invested in all of them. Not all of them are in California: Cua is based in San Francisco, Combinely in London.

On paper, nothing changes for an Italian applicant. The application is ‘open to any startup, anywhere in the world’, and no US company is needed to apply. If you’re accepted, YC says it will ‘help you get visas and incorporate’, with immigration lawyers who have helped hundreds of its founders. San Francisco isn’t optional, though. The batch is in person, with a three-day kick-off and weekly meetups, and after three months you can go wherever you want.

The company structure is the heavier job. YC invests only in corporations from the US, Canada, the Cayman Islands and Singapore, so an Italian Srl needs a new parent company in one of them. With a US parent in Delaware, that’s the Delaware flip: shareholders swap their Srl quotas for shares in the parent, and the Srl becomes its subsidiary. YC introduces you to lawyers, but warns it ‘will require significant effort on your part’.

Two Italian points need your commercialista, your accountant and tax adviser, before anyone signs. The swap raises Italian tax questions of its own, covered in our flip guide. And startup innovativa status requires a company resident in Italy, or in the EU or EEA with a production site or branch in Italy. A Delaware parent isn’t. Yet that status is what lets Italian individuals deduct 65% of their investment from IRPEF, Italy’s personal income tax, on up to €100,000 a year, if they hold the shares for at least three years. Tell your Italian angels before the flip, not after.

Common mistakes, and what to do if YC says no

Most of these come straight from YC’s own pages.

• A mission statement where the product should be. If a stranger can’t repeat what you make, rewrite it.
• A scripted or polished video.
• Waiting for more traction before you apply, which the FAQ calls ‘a mistake’.
• Two applications for two ideas. YC’s advice: pick your favourite and apply with that one.
• A product built by an agency, with no founder able to build it.
• Paying for a flip before you’ve been accepted, when you don’t need a US company to apply.
• Treating a no as final.

A rejection costs you months, not a year. With four batches the next deadline is never far, and you can reapply with what you’ve built since. Other doors exist too. In Italy, CDP Venture Capital’s national network counts 20 vertical accelerators, and its fund puts €70,000 to €200,000 into each startup at pre-seed. Our guide to startup accelerators in Italy and Europe sets them against the main programmes abroad.

Your four-week plan to 2 November

1. Week 1, 7 to 13 October: write the one-sentence description and each founder’s ‘something impressive’. Read them to someone outside tech and ask them to say back what you do.
2. Week 2, 14 to 20 October: draft every answer, then ‘cross out every word you don’t need’, as Graham puts it. Then hunt down the adjectives and replace them with numbers, like users, revenue or growth per week.
3. Week 3, 21 to 27 October: shoot the one-minute video, working from bullet points, with every founder in the frame. Two or three takes, then stop polishing.
4. Week 4, 28 October to 1 November: if you run an Srl, list every shareholder and ask your commercialista what a flip would involve. Ask, don’t start one.
5. Submit by Sunday 1 November, not at 4:59am on Tuesday, Italian time.

This article is general information, not legal or tax advice. Programme terms change: check YC’s official pages, and ask a lawyer or a commercialista before you restructure your company.