Since taking over from Paul Graham as the president at Y Combinator, Sam Altman has lead the way in YC’s funding of ‘hard science’. This started with a recent round of synthetic biology and biotech companies funded earlier this year including Ginkgo Bioworks and Glowing Plant.

https://twitter.com/sama/status/540259325399158784

Y Combinator has traditionally been in the software space funding groundbreaking startups including AirBnB and DropBox.

Now YC’s picking up the pace with another round of 10 biotech startups in this new batch. Altman also launched a new partnership with the on-line genetic cloud service provider Transcriptic. The news, announced on the YC blog offers $20k in free service for each of the Y Combinator companies.

Who else might be in this next round? If Y Combinator likes automation and biology, maybe Emerald Cloud Lab, Synthego or some of the recent hardware projects from Kickstarter like OpenTrons or Open qPCR. We await further announcements.

Competition in the bio accelerator space is now heating up, IndieBio, which offers lab space as well as $50,000 for 8% equity closed last week. This compares to $120k for 7% with YC, but only a virtual lab (via Transcriptic!). (full disclosure, I've agreed to be a mentor for IndieBio).