How to Get Into Y Combinator as an Indian Startup

In 2020, Mainak Sarkar and Pritam Khan applied for Y Combinator for the third time, for their startup Eatable. Their initial attempts had failed because they struggled to get through the interview round due to nerves. However, by their third attempt, they were able to crack the Y Combinator interview and got to be a part of YC’s first remote cohort. Their pitch involved Mainak explaining how Eatable would build an ecosystem for restaurants, solving all of their problems with a single platform. This impressed the team at Y Combinator, and eventually Eatable was able to raise $150,000 from YC. Then, in August of 2020 Explorex (a rebrand of Eatable) raised an $850,000 seed round, bringing their total fundraise to $1M at the end of 2020.

In 2021 when restaurants began opening back up again, Mainak and Pritam onboard three breweries in Bengaluru for their MVP, which consisted of an ordering and order management system. Their new customers loved Explorex, and the company realised that they had finally found product/market fit.

In 2022, Explorex raised $5 million from angels like Kevin Lin, co-founder of Twitch, James Park, co-founder of Fitbit, and Taher Savliwala, co-founder of Relief Technologies.

Today, Explorex powers more than 1,000 restaurants across 15 cities in India, including Easy Tiger, Forty Six Ounces, La Casa, Jook, ShakesBierre, Stories, Vapour, Fire Station, Fox In The Field, Cafe Azzure, Oia, and Tiger Tiger Brewhouse.

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[venkateshmabbu]

Background music is loud and very distracting

[victoryfile]

I love this because those 3 MBs were probably ones I visited frequently and this was a product I probably used. One question is probably how is Eatable different from Dotpe?