Welcome

Overview

Welcome sold software for producing branded virtual events that looked closer to a keynote than a video call. Its control room let a small team combine speakers, prerecorded video, graphics, music, audience chat, calls to action, and breakout sessions without a broadcast crew.^[1] The pitch arrived at the ideal moment: COVID-19 had forced conferences and customer events online, while Zoom and Google Meet still looked like meeting tools.

The timing helped Welcome turn a mid-Y Combinator pivot into a $12 million Series A and a 50-person company in less than a year.^[2][3] It also hid the category's weak point. Once in-person events returned, virtual production became a feature set inside the collaboration suites companies already bought. Welcome moved toward webinars and content marketing, but that put it against the same bundled platforms with a narrower reason to exist.

Welcome is now marked inactive by Y Combinator, its main website returns a 404 response, and a competing webinar vendor reported in early 2026 that users were being told the service was shutting down.^[4][5][6] No founder announcement, shutdown date, or financial post-mortem was found. The account below separates the documented sequence from the likely business mechanism.

Founding Story

Welcome began as a different company. Roberto Ortiz, Jerry Shen, Tiger Shen, and John Keh entered Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch with software connecting restaurants to food wholesalers.^[4] Shen later described waking at 1 a.m. to visit San Francisco wholesale markets and learning that the team had little fit with an industry reluctant to change. Customer growth was already weak before the pandemic. COVID-19 then closed every restaurant customer and prospect, and the founders' rented house caught fire one week before Demo Day.^[7]

The replacement idea drew on older experience. Ortiz and Shen had organized an entrepreneur meetup in 2013 that grew into a conference with large venues, production crews, and well-known speakers. The founders saw major companies recreating those events with Zoom, Slack, and other disconnected tools. Ortiz's earlier product career, including work as a Google product design lead, shaped Welcome's emphasis on visual polish.^[3]

That history led the team to build a producer's control surface for a branded show. Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman wrote that early users often signed up after attending a Welcome event and that the company gave All Raise use of the platform, turning the experience itself into distribution.^[8]

Timeline

• 2019: The founders started a restaurant and food-wholesaler marketplace.^[7]
• Winter 2020: The team joined Y Combinator, lost its restaurant market to COVID-19, and pivoted during the batch.^[4][7]
• November 2020: Welcome launched publicly and announced a $12 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Y Combinator, Kapor Capital, and Webb Investment Network.^[2]
• 2021: The company reported growing from three people to 50 in under a year. One early event hosted 7,000 engineers, and Kleiner Perkins used Welcome for a virtual conference attended by more than 400 Fellows.^[3][9]
• 2023: Welcome's public content increasingly framed webinars as a lead-generation and content-marketing channel, rather than treating virtual attendance as the main event category.^[10]
• Early 2026: Y Combinator listed Welcome as inactive; its website was offline, and a competitor reported that users had received shutdown notices.^[4][6]

What They Built

Welcome packaged a broadcast workflow into browser software. Producers could place speakers on a branded stage, mix live and prerecorded segments, add overlays and music, trigger calls to action, and send attendees into lounges or breakout rooms. Speakers had a private green room. Producers had a separate control room and could capture event analytics and recordings.^[1][11]