More than one-third of the famed startup accelerator Y Combinator’s latest batch of companies are focused specifically on artificial intelligence (AI).

Y Combinator received a record 24,000 applications for its latest cohort, and accepted just under 1 per cent of those, Garry Tan, president and chief executive officer of the accelerator, said on Tuesday (Jun 27) in an interview on Bloomberg Television. About 35 per cent of the companies selected for the programme are AI-focused, he said, and as many as half involve AI as a component of their business.

“There’s something very special happening here,” Tan said about AI in San Francisco. “The smartest people in the world are sitting in those cafes having discussions. Not just about starting their companies, but also what is the cutting edge of what these AI models can do.”

This year, for the first time since the pandemic, Y Combinator is making in-person participation a mandatory part of its programme, and will require all founders to be in the Bay Area. “There’s nothing like having the energy of having people in person,” Tan said.

The accelerator runs two programmes annually, one in the winter and one in the summer. Y Combinator pledges to invest US$500,000 in those startups selected for the programme and takes them through a three-month course on running a company. Some of its notable alumni include Airbnb and Stripe. BLOOMBERG