Canada was previously listed as an acceptable jurisdiction, but Internet Archive records show references to it were removed from the webpage in November 2025. A similar change was made to YC\u2019s frequently asked questions page. YC had previously backed Canadian-incorporated startups since at least its winter 2008 cohort.<\/p>\n
YC did not respond to repeated requests for comment.<\/p>\n
The change means that Canadian startups enrolling in the accelerator will need to set up a new parent company, with the U.S. the obvious jurisdiction. Foreign firms accepted to YC often relocate to San Francisco after the program to be part of the city\u2019s booming tech sector, and U.S. VCs frequently prefer to invest<\/a> in startups that operate as Delaware C-Corps, a particular type of legal entity. <\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n \t \t YC invests US$500,000 for a seven per cent stake in startups that participate in its three-month programs. YC\u2019s demo day attracts many of Silicon Valley\u2019s most important venture capital funds, and its startup school events feature<\/a> speakers like Tesla\u2019s Elon Musk, OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman and Eureka\u2019s Andrej Karpathy.<\/p>\n The program has long attracted promising Canadian startups. Alumni of the program include video sales firm Vidyard<\/a>, wearables developer North<\/a>, textile manufacturing innovator SRTX<\/a>, and AI engineering toolmaker CoLab<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n YC\u2019s startup directory shows it has accepted 144 Canadian firms since 2005, with the country providing up to 15 firms per batch. None of the 99 startups in the accelerator\u2019s winter 2026 cohort, which runs from January to March, are listed as being headquartered in Canada. The numbers don\u2019t include firms based elsewhere that have Canadian founders. <\/p>\n YC has recently ventured north of the border to recruit founders and firms. Four of the accelerator\u2019s investment partners visited<\/a> Toronto last September for an event aimed at students at Canadian universities; the panel also featured Farhan Thawar, head of engineering at Shopify.<\/p>\n Some Canadian founders and investors have previously expressed<\/a> concern that YC contributes to the brain drain of top tech talent. In March 2025, Bram Sugarman, a former executive at Shopify and OMERS Ventures, posted<\/a> a graph of Canadian startups in YC by batch. \u201cThe Canadians stay in the U.S.A. and raise more money,\u201d YC CEO Garry Tan, who was born in Winnipeg, posted in response. He claimed that firms that remain in San Francisco after the accelerator\u2019s demo day are two and a half times more likely to become unicorns than those that leave.<\/p>\n Applications for YC\u2019s spring 2026 batch close on Feb. 9. The accelerator\u2019s form asks firms to list where they currently live, where they plan to base their company after the program, and to justify their location decision.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TORONTO \u2014 Y Combinator is no longer investing in Canadian startups, forcing firms that want to join the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":722949,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3094],"tags":[51,3134,326,16,15,3141,14754],"class_list":{"0":"post-722948","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-entrepreneurship","10":"tag-tech","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom","13":"tag-venture-capital","14":"tag-y-combinator"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115964026939684477","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=722948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722948\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/722949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=722948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=722948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=722948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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