24-Year-Old From Uttar Pradesh Becomes Y Combinator's Youngest General Partner

Harshita Arora, 24, a self-taught coder from Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh, made history by becoming the youngest general partner at Y Combinator (YC) earlier this month. However, she hadn't exactly planned on this. "I never actually wanted to be a VC. But when YC approached me, I thought I'd try it for one batch. I figured it would be fun, I'd learn new things, and I'd get inspiration for my next project," she said.

Arora was a visiting partner at YC till the summer of 2025, mentoring early-stage founders, before being elevated to general partner. YC runs four batches a year, where select startups are mentored on building, launching, and growing their businesses. It culminates in a demo day, where they pitch their firms to an audience of investors to raise capital.

Her experience as visiting partner changed her perspective about the role. "I became more attached as time went on. After my first batch in 2021, I did a second batch, and by the third batch, I was deciding which companies to fund (on behalf of YC)," she said. "YC is different. There is so much going on with applications, events, and helping companies… It's run by former founders who bring the same intensity to YC they brought to their own startups," she added.

Her journey to YC from Saharanpur has been anything but conventional. Arora dropped out of school in the 8th grade. She took up homeschooling at age 14, but eventually gave it up to pursue her ambitions in tech. She said that her inspiration for this came from a person on Quora who was homeschooled and went on to compete in the International Olympiad in Informatics. "I took a very unconventional path. I'm not sure I'd recommend it to everyone because, at the time, I was very naive and strong-headed. Looking back, if people follow that path without a plan, it's unlikely to work. It wasn't a guaranteed success," she said.

Arora is a self-taught coder. She attended a four-week-long entrepreneurship programme at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where the seeds that led her to build her first iOS application were planted. She came back from the US and did research on applications and cryptocurrency, and soon thereafter launched an app to track crypto portfolios. This gained global attention and became the second most popular app for finance in the US and Canada in January 2016.

"Having access to a computer and the internet was everything; it's the reason I'm here," she said. "Having the resources to learn to code and being part of online forums like Hacker News and Quora was incredibly inspiring." Arora also mentioned that she was inspired by YC cofounder Paul Graham's essays.

In 2019, she moved to the US and cofounded a trucking platform called AtoB, which offers fuel cards, instant payouts for truckers, and financial tools, and serves over 30,000 fleets across the US. In 2024, she stepped down from her roles at the startup, which was valued at $800 million in 2022.

Y Combinator remains keen to fund more Indian founders, both those building locally and those choosing to scale from the US, Arora told ET. "While Indian founders build great startups, many cannot be in San Francisco and in YC due to visa issues even after selection," she said, pointing to immigration hurdles that disrupt founders at a critical stage.

The number of YC-backed Indian startups dropped to just four in 2024 from 66 in 2021, ET reported in July 2025. Arora attributed the decline to other factors as well. For instance, YC's return to in-person batches in San Francisco has made it harder for India-based founders to participate. "YC is not remote any more (as during Covid). You have to be there," she said.

"Most of the opportunities in AI are global in nature," Arora noted, and added that Silicon Valley continues to act as a strong magnet. "Most people are just choosing to come to the US and build there, that's where AI is." At the same time, many founders building for the Indian market are choosing to stay closer to home. This shift is also being driven by changing capital dynamics. Indian startups now have stronger domestic funding options and clearer pathways to public markets. Several companies, including Groww, Razorpay and Meesho, have undertaken costly reverse flips to move their holding entities back to India in preparation for local listings.