"The Hit Forge is a group of entrepreneurial engineers building mass-market web properties." What is YC? I think most people can't answer that clearly. To quote the home page: "Y Combinator is a new kind of venture firm specializing in funding early stage startups." That doesn't tell us new in what kind. I mean, incubator investors share such a description, but pg makes a point YC isn't one. But it's enough here to point out that, unlike YC, HitForge is some kind of a "co-operative" and if you fail your company you can still profit from the other companies.
What kind an investor is depends on who is the owner, why they invest, and how the ownership is implemented. The second part is what the investor does: what's the investment product, who are the customers, and how the operations are run. Answering these questions can take you a long way already.