Loopt became the first company accepted into Y Combinator’s inaugural batch.
Loopt was founded by Sam Altman and Nick Sivo as a location-sharing service for mobile phones. It joined Y Combinator’s first program in 2005, when the accelerator was still a small experiment rather than the globally recognized institution it later became.
The service let users share their locations with selected friends and interact through mobile devices. Loopt later raised venture funding and was acquired by Green Dot Corporation in 2012 for about $43.4 million.
Loopt is sometimes overshadowed by better-known Y Combinator alumni such as Reddit, Dropbox, and Airbnb. Those companies became prominent examples of the accelerator’s influence, but Loopt’s place in the inaugural batch makes it an important early milestone in accelerator history.