December has been a good month for
Y Combinator, the top Silicon Valley startup accelerator.
As Xconomy points out, Y Combinator has had three exits in just about two weeks.
The last two are small acquisitions. Movity, a real estate search startup, got picked up by real estate search engine Trulia, and Etacts, an email marketing company, by Salesforce.com.
Salesforce is also behind the biggest acquisition of the lot, cloud computing startup Heroku, for an eye-popping $212 million. Heroku is a platform for hosting ruby on rails apps, the preferred development framework for many startups. They had only raised $13 million so we assume Y Combinator, who typically invests around $20,000 in companies for 5%, did very well. If they got diluted by half, their $20,000 turned into about $5 million in just under three years, or a 400X return.
