Y Combinator abandons China program

YC China was set up in August last year with the recruitment of Qi Lu, a former group president and COO of Baidu, as CEO of the Beijing-based branch. Sam Altman, Y Combinator’s president at the time, said in a statement that the plan was “to build a long-term local organization that will combine the best of Silicon Valley and China.”

Altman was replaced earlier this year by Geoff Ralston, a former executive at Yahoo. “With this, our strategy changed back to our tried and true approach of supporting local and international start-ups from our headquarters in Silicon Valley,” the accelerator said in a recent blog post. “As a result, we decided that now is not the right time to run a new, country-specific version of Y Combinator.”

Qi, who has also filled executive positions at Yahoo and Microsoft, will continue to operate YC China as a separate entity under the name MiraclePlus. It coincides with the accelerator’s first demo day, which showcased 22 start-ups to more than 100 investors, as well as an ongoing fundraising effort. MiraclePlus’ debut had raised $55 million as of November 11, according to a regulatory filing.

Founded in 2005, Y Combinator is widely credited with pioneering the for-profit accelerator model, with some of the standout investees including Airbnb and Dropbox. Its sudden abandonment of a Chinese expansion has been widely interpreted as a reaction to growing uncertainties around the political complexities of US-China economic relations, including an unwinding of technological cooperation.

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• Topics
• Greater China
• North America
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• China
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• seed