How Y Combinator’s founder matching service helped startup Hona raise $3 million

Y Combinator is famous in Silicon Valley for many reasons, but there is one service that has quietly become one of the most powerful: an online founder matching tool.

“I think this is the most valuable digital product YC has created (i.e. more valuable than Bookface, etc.). It’s amazing how many founders I meet who met on YC’s co-founder matching platform,” tweeted seed investor Nikhil Basu Trivedi. (Bookface refers to YC’s popular online collection of practical startup tips for program participants.)

Hona, a recent Y Combinator graduate, is one example, although the story of its founders is a bit more exciting than just using the tool.

Hona is a GenAI medical records startup. It integrates with multiple electronic records systems and then summarizes a patient’s medical records, helping doctors prepare for the patient’s visit.

It was initially founded by two friends who have known each other since middle school, Danielle Yoesep and Adam Steinle. They reconnected after graduating from college and their respective first careers in technology and biotechnology. Steinle had been a biomedical engineer, a banker at Goldman, and a big tech product manager at Facebook. Yoesep was a scientist for a recently acquired biotech startup. They were hanging out with their high school friends while home for Thanksgiving, discussing how they wanted to start a startup when the idea for Hona was born. Although neither of them were doctors themselves, both had family members who were doctors or medical professionals and they quickly came up with an idea: AI to help doctors with data summaries on patients.

They knew they needed a co-founder with expertise in AI, so they signed up on Y Combinator’s co-founder matching platform. They found one in Shuying Zhang, who also knew she wanted to build a startup, something in healthcare and AI, and had signed up for the service. Zhang’s background combined biomedical engineering and software development, most recently working on AI at Google, and she previously worked at Amazon.

What followed was a process a bit like Tinder for co-founders.

Yoesep and Steinle looked through the profiles in the matching tool, as did Zhang. Each of them organized several meetings with potential co-founders. When Zhang met Yoesep and Steinle, they immediately clicked so well that the longtime friends offered Zhang a third stake in the company.

“We literally met and three weeks later we’re unemployed and trying to build this,” Steinle told TechCrunch.

Having met on Y Combinator, with their background in technology, they were exactly the type of startup that would be sure to be accepted into the competitive program. They immediately applied to YC for the summer 2023 batch.

And They were quickly rejected.

So they got to work on their own, building a prototype, showing it to their network of doctors, getting solid reviews, and organizing a small seed tour.

About four months later, they applied to YC again for the Winter 2024 batch and were accepted. One of the reasons they got in the second time, Yoesep recalls, was because they never changed direction, or pivoted, to use the hackneyed Silicon Valley term. Another reason was “bbecause of our dynamic during our interview, showing that we had become close and enjoyed working together,” she said.

Things started to come together for them after that. Doctors from Duke and Harvard have agreed to test the product and write a white paper, which is expected to be published later this month. Some well-known angels in the tech and biotech worlds have invested. And by the time Hona graduated from YC and held her famous Demo Day, she had already raised a $3 million seed round from General Catalyst (which is so serious about health tech that it bought a hospital system), Samsung, Rebel Fund (founded by Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman and Cruise co-founder Daniel Kan) and 1984 Ventures.

Hona still has a tough road ahead. AI for medical transcription is an increasingly crowded field. Large cloud providers like Google and Amazon offer such tools And dozens of startups are also tackling it.

But Steinle says Hona will be competitive because it’s “super customizable” to search medical records for the specific data a particular doctor needs before seeing a patient. A cardiologist would get a different summary than a nephrologist. For example, the next white paper is about references to kidney stones, so “we’re extracting information like how many millimeters was the stone right here?” Steinle describes.

As for Zhang, her advice to anyone dreaming of building a startup and considering using YC’s matching tool is to “just go out and try,” she says. “Once you start working with people, you’ll quickly know if you get along well. You will know it right away.