An anonymous reader shares a report: The declining participation of Indian and Southeast Asian startups in Y Combinator is slowly becoming a trend. The previous batches showed a steeper presence with 10 startups in the batch prior, 20 in S22, 37 in W22, 33 in S21 and a peak of 44 in W21. In a statement to TechCrunch, a YC spokesperson attributed the drop to shift back to in-person events by the storied venture accelerator firm that necessitates founders to relocate to the U.S. for a quarter of a year.

And for an increasingly growing number of international startups, thatâ(TM)s becoming a challenge. “We’ve found that there’s no replacement for being in person with other founders and investors for the three months of YC. One impact of that however is that we’ve seen international founders struggle to participate because of their inability to get visas,” the spokesperson said. The U.S. government has intensified visa scrutiny in recent years, particularly for countries with high visa overstays, due to national security and illegal immigration concerns. “The founders of GigaML, for example, are world-class researchers who trained Llama2 to beat Anthropic Claude 2. But the founders had to do office hours over Zoom because their visas were denied twice by U.S. Immigration. Founders want to come to the U.S. but can’t. We need policy change,” the YC spokesperson added.

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