Diana Hu Promoted to Managing Partner at Y Combinator

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan announced today that Diana Hu has been promoted to Managing Partner, joining Jared Friedman and Harj Taggar in YC's senior leadership. Hu has been one of YC's most active partners since joining full-time as a Group Partner in 2022, working with nearly 230 companies across 18 batches and logging over 2,100 office hours. Those companies now have a combined valuation of $7 billion.

Hu first came through YC as a founder herself. She co-founded Escher Reality (YC S17), an augmented reality backend company that was acquired by Niantic. Niantic acquired the startup in early 2018; Escher's technology enabled developers to build cross-platform AR experiences where multiple users could see and interact with the same virtual objects simultaneously.

At Niantic, Hu led the AR platform team. Before Escher, she led data science at OnCue, a cloud television platform that was sold to Verizon. She's originally from Chile and holds a BS and MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon, where she focused on computer vision and machine learning.

Hu is also a co-host of Lightcone, YC's twice-monthly podcast where she joins Garry Tan, Harj Taggar, and Jared Friedman to discuss emerging tech and its potential to reshape industries.

According to Tan's announcement, Hu has been central to YC's work with founders pushing into AI, robotics, and hard tech, with breakout companies from her portfolio including Avoca, Reducto, David AI, Salient, Stepful, and HappyRobot. The combination of having built a startup from zero and shipped technology at the scale of Pokémon GO's 100 million-plus players is what Tan called "exactly what today's founders need from a partner."