Imagine investing in a mutual fund that increased in value by 3,000%.
Given the anemic performance of most funds, you might find that hard to believe.
But today, we’ll show you a fund that’s managed to do it—
And more importantly, we’ll show you how you can get access to it.
A "Private Mutual Fund"
The name of this fund company is Y Combinator.
Perhaps you haven’t heard of it before—and there’s a reason for that:
You see, unlike most fund companies, Y Combinator doesn’t invest in public stocks...
Instead, it invests in private companies. More specifically, private start-ups.
Since 2005, Y Combinator has invested in over 700 start-ups.
That may sound like a lot, but in fact, Y Combinator is extremely selective: it invests in less than 3% of the companies that apply to its fund.
And this level of selectivity has proven to be lucrative for Y Combinator:
As of last year—the last time it publicly reported numbers—the value of its portfolio was up over 3,000%.
With performance like that, the investment community is champing at the bit to learn about new additions to its portfolio.
And just last week, Y Combinator announced 52 of them.
52 New Companies
Twice each year, Y Combinator hosts an event called “Demo Day.”
Demo Day is a public launch pad for the new start-ups in its fund, and the event causes quite a bit of excitement.
You see, some of today’s most valuable companies once presented there—from Airbnb (now worth over $25 billion) to DropBox (now valued at $10 billion and on the verge of an IPO).
Of the 52 start-ups that presented last week, some were intriguing consumer applications, while others featured world-changing medical technology.
Here is a small sampling of some of the more innovative companies:
Atomwise — Normally, it takes drug companies many years and billions of dollars to discover new drugs. Atomwise is a software platform that uses advanced algorithms and machine learning to dramatically speed up this process.
A few months ago, for example, the company kicked off a search for an Ebola treatment. In just one week, it identified two potential drug combinations that could cure the disease.
EquipmentShare — EquipmentShare is going after the $145 billion construction equipment market. Think of it like Airbnb for construction companies.
The problem it’s addressing is that most construction equipment sits idle 75% of the time. EquipmentShare solves this problem by allowing equipment owners to rent out their idle gear to smaller contractors.
Notable Labs — One of the holy grails of modern medicine is personalized cancer treatment. No patient—and no tumor—is exactly the same. Customized treatment plans dramatically increase a patient’s survivability.
But it takes a lot of time and money to find the right combination of treatments.
Notable Labs provides a solution. It takes a sample of a patient’s tumor, runs many drug combination experiments on it, then makes data-driven recommendations to the patient’s oncologist.
These were just 3 of the 52 companies that presented at Demo Day...
The purpose of Demo Day is for these companies to announce their existence to the world—but it’s also to drum up interest from other investors.
And if you’re a longtime Crowdability reader, you may already have had the opportunity to invest in one of these potentially world-changing companies.
Let me explain...
A Mutual Fund for Startups
Every so often, we come across a certain investment opportunity. We call it "A Mutual Fund for Start-ups."
Essentially, it’s an opportunity to invest in a diversified batch of Y Combinator companies with a single investment.
For example, in a report we published earlier this year, we featured an opportunity called the "Orange Fund II."
The Orange Fund II allowed investors to back 20 companies from Y Combinator’s 2015 portfolio with a single investment.
Meaning, if you’d read our report, you could have gotten into some of the most sought after start-up investments in the world—before most other investors even knew they existed.
And today, we’ll let you in on a little secret...
This secret will allow you to find similar investments on your own in the future.
WeFunder
As you know, Crowdability scours the web to find online investment opportunities from many different funding websites.
We aggregate deals from sites like AngelList, OurCrowd, SeedInvest and many others.
We then feature them in our Deals database and in our Monday issue of the Crowdability newsletter.
All of these websites feature promising start-up investment opportunities, and each one tends to specialize in specific types of investments.
OurCrowd, for example, focuses primarily on international start-ups. AngelList, on the other hand, tends to focus on start-ups in Silicon Valley.
But one funding website focuses almost exclusively on the high-quality start-ups that are part of Y Combinator.
That website is called WeFunder.
As WeFunder itself was once part of Y Combinator, it’s been granted prime access to many Y Combinator portfolio companies.
So if you want to stay ahead of the curve and have a shot at investing in Y Combinator’s next batch of opportunities, head over to WeFunder and sign-up today.
Happy investing.
Please note: Crowdability has no relationship with WeFunder or with any of the companies or platforms we write about. Crowdability is an independent provider of education, information and research on start-ups and alternative investments.
Best Regards,
Founder
Crowdability.com
