yc-w19
(5)
Suyash Sinha
Suyash Sinha is the co-founder and CEO of Exly (YC W19), an all-in-one business platform that helps creators, coaches and knowledge entrepreneurs launch, manage and grow their online businesses. An IIT Kharagpur and IIM Calcutta graduate and former Boston Consulting Group consultant, he first built MyScoot, a marketplace for home-hosted social experiences, then pivoted the company through the pandemic to create Exly. The company has raised roughly $9.8 million to date, including a $6.2 million round led by Chiratae Ventures in 2024.
Hitoshi Harada
Hitoshi Harada is the Co-Founder, CTO, and CPO of Alpaca Markets - the fintech unicorn building what he calls the 'Global Financial OS.' A Keio University-trained computer scientist who rewrote parts of PostgreSQL (Window Functions, PL/v8), Harada spent years building distributed databases at Greenplum before co-founding Alpaca in 2015 with Yoshi Yokokawa. The company, named after an alpaca they spotted on a Silicon Valley billionaire's estate, has grown to command 94% of the global tokenized US equities market, serve 300+ financial institutions across 40+ countries, and reach unicorn status at $1.15B valuation with a $150M Series D in January 2026.
Kurt Ruppel
Kurt Ruppel is the Co-Founder and CTO of Middesk, the business identity platform that helps financial institutions, fintechs, and marketplaces verify and onboard businesses in seconds rather than weeks. A UC Berkeley cognitive science alumnus turned engineer, he built his technical chops at Zendesk and Checkr before co-founding Middesk with Kyle Mack in 2018. The company went through Y Combinator's Winter 2019 batch, secured a $4M seed led by Accel and Sequoia before Demo Day ended, and raised a $57M Series B in 2022—bringing total funding to over $77M. Ruppel leads Middesk's technical vision, focusing on primitives and forward concepts that transform raw business data into actionable intelligence for the financial ecosystem.
Yoshi Yokokawa
Yoshi Yokokawa is the co-founder and CEO of Alpaca, the San Mateo-based API-first brokerage infrastructure company that powers over 300 global fintech partners across 45 countries. A former Lehman Brothers analyst and forex trader turned repeat entrepreneur, Yoshi built Alpaca from a YC W19 startup into a $1.15 billion unicorn after raising a $150 million Series D in January 2026. His vision: a 'Global Financial OS' that makes investing borderless, accessible, and developer-native.
Charlie Warren
Charlie Warren is a startup founder-turned-investor who built Convex, a commercial services software platform, from a garage bootstrapping sprint through $60M in venture funding and a YC Top Companies nod, before selling to ServiceTitan in 2024. Today he serves as a Visiting Partner at Y Combinator, bringing hard-won founder experience to the next wave of vertical SaaS builders. His unusual arc - Goldman Sachs to energy policy to enterprise software - gives him a perspective on markets that most investors simply don't have.