Córdoba, Argentina
He submitted a Y Combinator application in two hours on a friend's dare. Two percent of applicants get in. Filadd did. Now 25,000 students a year across four countries are going to university because of it.
In 2016, Joaquin Olmedo was finishing his industrial engineering degree at the Universidad Católica de Córdoba when he started building what he would later describe, with characteristic understatement, as "a hobby." The hobby was Filadd: an online course platform helping Argentine students prepare for university entrance exams.
It did not stay a hobby. Nor did it stay in Argentina. By the time Olmedo and his co-founders - Agustín Trombotto (CTO), Nicolás Ferrer (COO), and Guillermo Bruchmann Tanodi (CPO) - were done expanding, Filadd was operating in Chile, Colombia, and Brazil as well. Four countries. One platform. And a stack of metrics that would eventually catch the attention of partners at Y Combinator.
I don't really know why I founded Filadd, but helping young people through their process of becoming adults makes me proud and is the fuel I need to make the company grow.
Joaquin Olmedo, CEO, FiladdThat quote is revealing precisely because it is not a polished founder pitch. There is no mention of total addressable market or five-year exit scenarios. Olmedo founded Filadd not because he ran a strategic analysis of Latin American edtech but because something about it mattered to him - and that stubbornly personal motivation turned out to be exactly what the company needed.
He spent a year after graduation doing new business development at Promedon, a medtech company. In 2018, he went full-time on Filadd. What happened next was less a hockey stick and more a steady climb: first investment from Incutex in 2019, expansion into new markets, and then, in 2021, a casual question that changed everything.
A Mexican investor looked at Filadd's numbers in 2021 and said, "Why don't you apply to Y Combinator?" Olmedo hadn't planned to. He investigated, put together an application in roughly two to three hours, and submitted it. Out of 16,000 applicants, about 380 were accepted. Filadd was one of them.
Acceptance rate: ~2%
When Filadd got the call that they were accepted into YC S21, Olmedo was already clear on what had won them in: the metrics. "The partners were impressed by our metrics, especially revenue," he later said. Filadd had not applied because of a clever narrative - they had applied because the numbers were quietly extraordinary, and the numbers did the talking.
The Y Combinator experience gave Olmedo two things he says he values above everything else from that period. First: the network. Direct access to founders who had navigated the same territory and could flag pitfalls before Filadd stepped in them. Second: clarity on Product-Market Fit - not as a startup cliché, but as a concrete prerequisite. You cannot scale what has not yet clicked. Filadd had clicked. Now they had permission to push.
His advice to founders considering applying? "Don't build a company to apply to Y Combinator. Let Y Combinator be the result of doing things well." The company should speak for itself. Filadd did.
Don't build a company to apply to Y Combinator. Let Y Combinator be the result of doing things well.
Joaquin Olmedo on startup buildingFiladd's primary YC partner was Diana Hu, one of YC's partners focused on international companies with high-growth potential outside Silicon Valley. Filadd was part of the Summer 2021 batch alongside 45 other Latin American companies - the largest LatAm cohort YC had seen at that point.
Filadd is not a tutoring app. It is not a homework helper. It is a platform purpose-built for one of Latin America's most consequential bottlenecks: the gap between high school and higher education. Every year, millions of students in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia sit standardized entrance exams - Chile's PAES, Brazil's ENEM, Argentina's CBU - that determine where, and whether, they go to university.
Filadd meets students at that exact moment of pressure. The platform combines video lessons, live tutoring, AI-powered study plans, downloadable resources, and adaptive assessments into something that looks nothing like a typical online course. Students get personalized learning paths. They get feedback. They get tracked progress. And - crucially - they get results.
In 2023, 92% of Filadd's 10,000 Chile students were admitted to their desired university and program. That is not a testimonial. That is an outcome. And it is the kind of outcome that earns a company recognition as the sole representative in the "international education" category of Holon IQ's 2024 Latin America EdTech 100.
At UCC's EmprendeTalks in August 2024, Olmedo returned to his alma mater to speak to more than a hundred students at the Faculty of Economics and Administration. He emphasized that entrepreneurship is not purely economic: "El emprendedor genera empleo y eso es clave en Argentina y en cualquier lugar del mundo." (The entrepreneur generates employment, and that is key in Argentina and anywhere in the world.)
He pushed further — entrepreneurs should weigh social and human impact alongside profit. For Olmedo, this is not a PR talking point. It is the reason he stayed.
Filadd's early growth was supported by Incutex, a Córdoba-based startup accelerator and investor that backed the company before Y Combinator came calling. Olmedo has been open about the role local support played in getting Filadd to the metrics that eventually impressed YC partners. Building in Córdoba was a deliberate choice — and it worked.
Filadd's Y Combinator application was written in about two hours after an off-hand challenge from a Mexican investor. Most YC applications take weeks. Filadd's metrics made up the difference.
Olmedo studied Industrial Engineering at the same Córdoba university where he later returned to give a keynote at EmprendeTalks in 2024 - speaking to 100+ students from his alma mater.
Filadd's Chile pre-university program reaches over 1.5 million students annually - making it one of the largest digital learning programs of its kind in Latin America.
Olmedo also sits on the board of Promedon, the medtech company where he worked in 2017 before founding Filadd full-time - he never fully walked away from his first professional home.
The company should speak for itself.
On startup building and YC applicationsThe entrepreneur generates employment, and that is key in Argentina and anywhere in the world.
UCC EmprendeTalks, August 2024Olmedo says the two things he took most from Y Combinator were the network - access to experienced founders who'd made the mistakes first - and a sharper understanding of Product-Market Fit as a hard prerequisite for scaling. Filadd had already earned its PMF by the time it applied. YC gave them the tools and connections to act on it.