Method · data as of 2026-10-07

How the odds are calculated

A statistical model trained on what actually happened to YC companies since 2024, tested on companies it never saw. Modest, honest, and checkable.

0.63

AUC on the 2-year backtest (0.5 = coin flip). 0.67 across all snapshots.

2.0×

acquisition rate in its top 250 vs. average (14% vs 6.8%)

643

acquisitions learned from, in 14,636 company snapshots

The data

The public Y Combinator company directory, via the open yc-oss dataset, which keeps a daily history. We took snapshots on 2024-10-07, 2025-04-07, 2025-10-07, 2026-04-07 and recorded which companies that were active then had been acquired by 2026-10-07.

What the model looks at

Only what was known at each snapshot: years since YC, team size and how it changed over the previous six months, whether it was hiring or stopped, growth stage, industry and sector, tags, location, words in its one-liner, a renamed company (a pivot), and how many companies in the same sector were acquired recently. Fields that change because of an acquisition are never used.

Strongest toward an acquisition

↑ tag: Open Source

↑ industry: B2B

↑ based in United States of America

↑ based in America / Canada

↑ “platform” in its one-liner

↑ 1.5–3 years since YC

↑ tag: SaaS

↑ team of 6–10

Strongest against

↓ team of 1–2

↓ under 1.5 years since YC

↓ tag: AI

↓ industry: Healthcare

↓ sector: Supply Chain and Logistics

↓ based in Latin America

↓ tag: Marketplace

↓ new to the directory in the last six months

The model

A regularized discrete-time hazard model: each company gets a yearly acquisition rate from its features, so snapshots with different time windows train one model, and the two-year odds follow directly. It was scored with five-fold cross-validation, keeping each company's snapshots in a single fold so it never helps predict itself.

Calibration

Companies grouped into tenths by predicted odds (2-year backtest from 2024-10-07). When the bars match, a "12%" means about 12% were acquired.

predicted actually acquired

Limits

Directory data can't see revenue, funding, burn or acquisition talks, which drive most deals. Treat the odds as a base rate for companies like this one, not a tip.
One market period: 2024–2026. If deal-making speeds up or slows down, the odds shift with it.
"Acquired" includes acqui-hires and small deals; the directory doesn't say how big an exit was.
The signals brief is a reading of the company's own site and YC profile, not news. Each quote is checked against its source.

Not investment advice. ExitOdds is independent and not affiliated with Y Combinator.

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