There is lots of promising non-web startups -- the fact that this question even needs to be asked is evidence of how insular the YC news community can be at times.
The field I know best is database systems -- there are a number of interesting startups in this area. There's an emerging market for "complex event processing" (essentially database systems that operate on live streams of data as well as static historical data), which has applications to algorithmic trading, network monitoring, real-time business intelligence, military applications, etc. I work for one startup in this field (http://www.truviso.com -- we're hiring!), but there are several others (Corel8, StreamBase, Aleri, etc.)
There's also data warehousing, in which there are a lot of startups challenging the existing players: GreenPlum, ParAccel, Vertica, DATAllegro, C2 Appliance, etc.
More broadly, I think non-web startups are typically trying to solve harder and more interesting problems than the web guys. The time-to-market is often longer than with a typical consumer-oriented web startup, and if you're trying to sell to enterprises, that brings a very different set of sales challenges than selling ads on a website, for example. That often means you need a founding team with a deep technical background, and you've often got to take the traditional VC route (rather than bootstrapping). So I can understand why it's not a good fit for the traditional YC model. Still, there are a ton of startups out there, and many (most?) of them aren't developing web apps.
Comments
There is lots of promising non-web startups -- the fact that this question even needs to be asked is evidence of how insular the YC news community can be at times.
The field I know best is database systems -- there are a number of interesting startups in this area. There's an emerging market for "complex event processing" (essentially database systems that operate on live streams of data as well as static historical data), which has applications to algorithmic trading, network monitoring, real-time business intelligence, military applications, etc. I work for one startup in this field (http://www.truviso.com -- we're hiring!), but there are several others (Corel8, StreamBase, Aleri, etc.)
There's also data warehousing, in which there are a lot of startups challenging the existing players: GreenPlum, ParAccel, Vertica, DATAllegro, C2 Appliance, etc.
More broadly, I think non-web startups are typically trying to solve harder and more interesting problems than the web guys. The time-to-market is often longer than with a typical consumer-oriented web startup, and if you're trying to sell to enterprises, that brings a very different set of sales challenges than selling ads on a website, for example. That often means you need a founding team with a deep technical background, and you've often got to take the traditional VC route (rather than bootstrapping). So I can understand why it's not a good fit for the traditional YC model. Still, there are a ton of startups out there, and many (most?) of them aren't developing web apps.