Native is backed by Y Combinator.
We have some news. Y Combinator is backing Native.
If that name means nothing to you, you are in good company. Most people outside tech have never heard it, and there is no reason you should have. So here is what it is, why it matters, and what it does not change.
What Y Combinator is
Y Combinator is a startup program in San Francisco. It began in 2005 with a plain idea. Find people building something early, back them with money and honest advice, then get out of their way.
Four times a year it picks a small group of companies and works with them closely for three months. At the end, each one presents to a room full of investors. Then the part that lasts begins. The people you meet there stay with you for the life of the company.
They give every founder the same advice, and it fits on one line. Make something people want.
You already use what came out of it
Airbnb went through it. So did Stripe, which quietly moves the money behind a large part of the internet. Dropbox. Reddit. Coinbase. DoorDash. Twitch. Instacart. OpenAI started there too.
Put together, the companies Y Combinator has funded are worth more than a trillion dollars. Every one of them started the way we did, with a few people, an unfinished product, and a stubborn opinion about how something ought to work.
Far more companies apply than get in.
What it means for you
The honest answer is speed.
Money and good advice turn into engineering time, and engineering time turns into the things you have been asking us for. The roadmap does not change. It just arrives sooner.
It also means the people who built the products above now look at ours. When something we are planning is a bad idea, we find out earlier, and you never have to live with it.
What it does not change
We are still in Oslo, and Native is still built for the businesses we built it for. The bakery, the salon, the carpenter, the accountant. Small teams with no marketing department and no hours to spare.
Same team, same product, same prices, and the same people answering when you write to us.
Being backed by Y Combinator does not make Native a Silicon Valley company. It makes us a Norwegian one with better tools and sharper questions.
Thank you for using Native. We're just getting started.
