Vivian Midha Shen Joins YC as General Partner

Vivian Midha Shen, co-founder of Juni Learning and founder of AI tutoring company Acely, has been named a General Partner at Y Combinator. YC President and CEO Garry Tan announced the appointment on October 1, along with that of Cron founder Raphael Schaad to the same role.

Both spent the previous two batches as Visiting Partners. In that program, former founders come in to advise companies during the batch, and Front co-founder Mathilde Collin joined YC that way earlier this year. As General Partners, Shen and Schaad will work with startups from their first weeks in the batch and keep working with them after it ends.

Shen went through YC herself in Winter 2018 with Juni Learning, which runs online coding and math classes for kids. She later started Acely, an AI tutor that prepares students for college. According to YC, the two companies together brought in more than $50 million in revenue and reached millions of users. Acely grew from nothing to a $10 million revenue run rate with a small team. Tan pointed to that growth as an example of what lean, AI-native companies can now do.

Before starting companies, Shen was a software engineer at Google, a consultant at McKinsey, and Director of Product at Operator. She studied computer science and creative writing at Stanford. At her own startups she worked across engineering, product, design, and marketing.

Schaad founded Cron (YC W20), a calendar app that Notion acquired in 2022. He went on to grow Notion Calendar to millions of users and later became Notion's Head of Design for growth and new products. Earlier in his career he worked on Flipboard and the Markdown editor iA Writer. He holds a master's degree in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT.