Startup accelerator Y Combinator (YC) has selected the mentors for its latest batch of Chinese startups, including executives and an academic who will coach young entrepreneurs in its winter program, our sister site TechNode Chinese reports.
The newly formed mentor team—known as Part-time Partners—consists of Huang Zheng, CEO of social e-commerce giant Pinduoduo, CEO of parental knowledge-sharing platform Babytree Group and former Yahoo and Google executive Allen Wang, as well as Professor Eric Xing from Carnegie Mellon University.
They will work with YC China’s Founding CEO Lu Qi to help mentor young Chinese entrepreneurs that have been selected for the program. Lu, an artificial intelligence expert and former Baidu executive, joined YC China in August last year. He also joined Pinduoduo’s advisory committee the same month the company went public in the US.
The US-based incubator said it had completed the selection process for this year’s winter camp and it would begin a three-month training session this month. All will debut globally at Y Combinator’s Winter 2019 Demo Day later this March. The venue has yet to be decided.
Chinese startups in the program will travel between China and the US. The three mentors will be solely focused on Chinese entrepreneurs.
Y Combinator announced its entry into China in April 2018 and the company launched its Startup School at Tsinghua University in May. It chose Beijing because it “does not rely on [Silicon] Valley,” according to Eric Migicovsky, a partner at the company.
A YC spokesperson told TechNode that it recently broke its application record, receiving more than 11,000 applications from startups around the globe, of which a record high 200 were China-based.