NEW: The Sierra Club embraced social justice. Then it tore itself apart. nytimes.com/2025/11/07/us/po…

Today, BillionToOne went public, becoming YC's 4th biotech IPO. As a company that quietly provides societally important infrastructure, BillionToOne is less well known than they deserve to be. Here is their story, from grad students to IPO. BillionToOne is the rare company that is both incredibly good for the world and also an extremely good business. 1 in 11 pregnancies in the US take the BillionToOne genetic test, and through this they prevent an immense amount of human suffering. But BillionToOne is also the rare biotech that has generated revenue from the early days. It has always had excellent margins, rapid growth, and capital efficiency. Today, it is going public not just as a scientific success, but a commercial one, with over $265M in ARR and 65% gross margins. We met the BillionToOne founders, Oguzhan and David, when they were still finishing up their PhDs. At the time, BillionToOne was only an idea, but it was a thought provoking one. When a woman is pregnant, fragments of the fetus' DNA circulate in her blood. What if you could design a genetic test for the fetus using this free circulating DNA? That would allow you to do pre-natal genetic testing with a simple blood draw. The problem is that this DNA is a mess - it's tiny snippets mixed in with a much larger amount of unrelated fragments. To extract the signal from the noise requires both advanced wet lab sequencing techniques and also advanced machine learning algorithms. Oguzhan and David were the exact right people to crack this because they had both biology and CS backgrounds. The BillionToOne founders have always moved fast. In just 6 months from YC funding them, while still finishing their PhDs, they went from an idea to a proof of concept. From there, it was just two years to regulatory approval and a commercially available test. They haven't slowed down. While the pre-natal genetic testing market they started in is over a $2B market and still mostly untapped, they've already expanded to a second market in oncology. It turns out that their same technology that makes sense of free floating DNA can also be used to detect cancer from a blood test. The potential market size for that is enormous - perhaps $100B. That is where BillionToOne is going, and it's quite possible that if you're reading this, you will someday regularly take their blood test to stay cancer free. To all the people who say that Silicon Valley just funds GPT wrappers and B2B SaaS, BillionToOne should be a star example of how the SV ecosystem can solve societally important problems. It is a classic story of how a highly technical team, an ambitious idea, and a small amount of funding can catalyze the creation of enormous value.

”BillionToOne is the rare company that is both incredibly good for the world and also an extremely good business. 1 in 11 pregnancies in the US take the BillionToOne genetic test.” From YC17 to IPO today. So impressive.

Congrats to Oguzhan, David and the @BillionToOneInc team on going public today! *1 in 11 babies born in the US are tested with BillionToOne's fetal genetic test.* That's an incredible stat. Here's to many more milestones and breakthroughs ahead.

When Oguzhan and David applied to YC, their idea was just a concept. Today, their company @BillionToOneInc (S17) is going public—their genetic test now helps screen 1 in 11 US babies, and their tech unlocks earlier detection from prenatal care to cancer. ycombinator.com/blog/billion…

Giga (@gigaml) is building the next generation of customer support — real-time AI agents that can understand emotion, resolve issues instantly, and scale across the world’s largest enterprises. The team recently raised $61M to power emotionally intelligent, human-quality conversations at enterprise speed and scale. In this interview with YC's @harjtaggar, co-founders @varunvummadi and @eshamanideep share how they’re reimagining enterprise support from the ground up, what it takes to build AI for high-compliance industries, and why emotionally intelligent agents are the future of customer experience. 02:25 – What Giga Does and Who It Serves 05:10 – Building Emotionally Intelligent AI Agents 08:15 – Real-Time Responses at Enterprise Scale 11:45 – Designing for Compliance and Security 15:00 – Human-Quality Conversations at Machine Speed 18:20 – Lessons from Early Customer Deployments 22:10 – Powering the Next Generation of Support 26:45 – What It Takes to Build for the Enterprise 30:15 – The Future of Customer Experience 33:40 – Advice for Founders Building in AI

The people want common sense centrists (actual revealed preference) But news likes to promote the extreme and salacious, so we hear about Mamdani 100x more than Spanberger

Never let a dead cat go to waste sfstandard.com/opinion/2025/…

The Mission District supervisor wants to ban Waymo because a cat ran across the street and was killed by a Waymo. It makes sense that people are questioning new technology that is magical that they don't understand. Every new technology shift has had its share of early fear-mongering. But autonomous vehicles have an incredible safety record. Waymo reports 91% fewer serious injuries than humans. And it will only keep getting better from here. That's the nature of technology.

Today, humanity is shackled by scarcity of expertise. When expertise becomes infinitely scalable, humans will be freed to tackle problems we can't even conceive of today. Introducing @AfterQuery. We’re building a world where expertise is abundant. Domain by domain, profession by profession, AfterQuery is crafting datasets that encode excellence into forms that machines can learn. Data is the final frontier.

Voice AI startup Giga raises $61 million to take on customer service automation fortune.com/2025/11/05/voice…

epic founders and company. Pretty incredible to see this YC team win customer service contracts with the biggest enterprise customers

Excited to share our partnership with DoorDash. Together we went from kickoff to real impact — in weeks, not quarters. Highlights: - Time to value: weeks, not quarters - Quality at scale: 90%+ DWR in production - Built for scale: 10B+ lifetime orders, 500K+ merchants, 8M+ Dashers, and hundreds of thousands of daily assistance requests

Lightberry (@lightberryai) lets humanoids be useful out of the box. They integrate with major manufacturers like Unitree and Booster to make their robots speak, read the room, and navigate the world - just like in Star Wars. ycombinator.com/launches/Okr… Congrats on the launch, @sadkoeni & @aliatttar!

From dorm rooms to million-dollar companies. You can just do things. And YC can help. Apply to W26 by November 10: ycombinator.com/apply

Congrats to @Starcloud_Inc1 on the launch of their first satellite, just 21 months from starting the company. This is the first NVIDIA H100 in space and paves the way for huge, solar-powered orbital data centers.

He was 19 when he went to defend Ukraine and spent the next three years in Russian captivity. His name is Danylo Guards beat his leg with a steel pipe until it turned black, burned his back with stun gun and gave him food with worms and rat shit. (Interview for SlidstvoInfo) 1/

I’ve been trying to say this, yet politicians in my hometown of Uppsala keep wasting loads of taxpayer money on laying rails, for no good reason. It’s the same when the Greens (Miljöpartiet) oppose roads, roads that by the time built, will be mostly EV sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uppsal…

This is correct. SF only improved because political organizing managed to coordinate the elections of: - the mayor - 6/11 supervisors - the DA - subsequent appointments to the police commission Extremely difficult to describe this coherently to even very smart people.

Congrats to @MaxJunestrand, @siggelabor, and @WeAreLegora on their $150M Series C at a $1.8B valuation! Legora is the collaborative AI platform helping lawyers review and research faster, draft smarter, and advise with precision. In just six months, they've grown from 250 to 400+ customers, expanded from 20 to 40+ markets, serving top firms like Linklaters, Cleary Gottlieb, and Goodwin. Tens of thousands of legal professionals now use Legora daily. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…