Our favorite startups from YC’s Winter 2022 Demo Day, part 2 – TechCrunch

And that’s day two in the books!

TechCrunch once again spent much of the day watching a parade of startups present as part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 cohort, Demo Day part two. Yeah, that’s a mouthful. But we did learn quite a lot.

You can find all our coverage here, but what matters is that themes are emerging from the YC milieu. Southeast Asia is a huge startup target, with a host of business models building for its population. Fintech was, again, a huge category of work around the world.

There were also a few surprises. Frankly we expected more crypto (web3? blockchain?) companies to be in the mix. And while there were a number of API-first startups, there were fewer than we might have guessed. That said, we don’t know the precise monetization method of every software startup that pitched, so we could be undercounting.

As always, to cap off the day we’ve picked a few favorites from the day’s presentations. Every TechCrunch reporter has their own set of interests and topic areas, so the following are not us endorsing any particular company or declaring winners. Instead, they are faves, the company’s that caught our eye as the most interesting. A big thanks to Devin Coldeway, Mary Ann Azevedo and Christine Hall for contributing.

If you need more on demo days, Equity has you covered. And with that, we can get started!

Our favorite startups from YC Winter 2022, day two

The following list is in no particular order. Companies’ websites and authors’ Twitter profiles are linked.

Christine Hall: DimOrder

• Details: DimOrder, a Hong Kong-based company founded in 2019, is developing a restaurant point-of-sale system for Southeast Asia. Its technology enables those in the food and beverage industry to accept online payments, market to customers, order food from suppliers and receive short-term loans.
• Why it’s a fave: Restaurant tech is big right now, and there is a lllloooootttt of funding going into this space. DimOrder is bringing in $183,000 monthly recurring revenue and growing 13% month over month. As the daughter of a former hotel chef, I watched my father make his food ordering lists on a legal pad and call them in. I believe systems like this would have given him that time back to focus on other things.