Y Combinator accepts Women Who Code

Women Who Code is the latest diversity non-profit to enter Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley accelerator that has helped produce companies like Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe and Instacart. Although Y Combinator first started accepting non-profits in 2013, and has since been including non-profits in every YC Batch, /dev/color was the first non-profit focused on diversity that YC had ever accepted. Women Who Code will be the second.

Now, Women Who Code CEO Alaina Percival and Chief Maker Zassmin Montes de Oca will join the YC Summer 2016 program and receive a charitable donation — rather than traditional funding where YC gets a stake in the company.

“We were very impressed with both how quickly they’re growing (from 25k-50k members in a year) and the success stories they’ve had so far,” YC founder Jessica Livingston said in a canned statement. “We hope to help WWCode scale the most impactful parts of their program so they can create more female role models in tech and empower even more people around the world.”

Women Who Code aims to get more women involved and excelling in tech careers. To date, it has served over 50,000 women across 60 cities and 20 countries through its technical and leadership events.

To be clear, there are a ton of organizations that aim to get women and/or young girls involved in coding and tech. There’s Girls Who Code, Girls in Tech, Women in Technology, Lesbians Who Tech, Black Girls CodeGirls Teaching Girls to Code and Girl Develop It. Why some of these organizations can’t merge and work together is beyond me.