TBPN Live - Live @ YC Demo Day | Garry Tan, Delian Asparouhov, Matteo Franceschetti & Many More

Episode Date: June 12, 2025

Today's show was recorded live on location at Y Combinator Demo Day and is made up of short interviews with a variety of batch founders and investors in attendance. Back to regular programming tomorrow!TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(00:45) - Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator (16:34) - Kaizen (22:17) - StarSling (28:28) - Jazzberry (35:07) - Cotool (41:29) - Clado (48:50) - Outset (01:00:11) - Operative (01:10:02) - Matteo Franceschetti, Founder & CEO of Eight Sleep (01:17:52) - throxy (01:24:56) - Morphik (01:30:41) - Clidey (01:34:29) - Cua (01:43:26) - Delian Asparouhov, Co-Founder of Varda (01:53:37) - Dave Munichiello, Managing Partner at GV (02:07:41) - Andrew Lee, Partner at a16z (02:20:13) - Chonkie (02:24:30) - Godela (02:29:55) - Den (02:35:57) - Eloquent AI (02:40:18) - YouLearn (02:46:49) - Blaxel (02:50:55) - Waffle (02:55:21) - VibeGrade (03:01:54) - Avallon AI (03:04:07) - text.ai (03:10:25) - ValueMate (03:14:04) - Bloom (03:19:26) - MorphoAI (03:24:06) - Prism AI (03:26:36) - Clarm (03:28:30) - Cactus (03:30:27) - Lumari (03:32:15) - Third Chair (03:34:19) - QFEX (03:36:01) - Minerva (03:37:26) - Sim Studio

You're watching TVB and today is Wednesday June 11 2025 we are live from the palace of party rounds It's why see demo day welcome to our YC demo day stream that is we have Gary Tam joining us Wow you We brought lots of party favors we brought lots of activities for when we talk to founders who are doing extremely If that's going off every time the founder hits a million dollars in ARR or signs term sheet I think we're gonna be up to our necks in We got a lot of confetti. We got some gifts. We're gonna be giving out. We got some surprise gifts some hats We're gonna take you all through it Gary Tan Welcome to the street is here. What's going on the president of white commoner Gary? Gary tan good to see you

There's a line around the block still yeah, is that right? Yeah. Oh my god. Yeah, it's absolutely slammed take us through What are you seeing? How's this one going? What's actually changed because we're in a different location Yeah, we're literally break it all down in the middle of this is like our HQ. You know, this is a You know, we got the spring batch together. This is the first spring batch that we've ever done. So it's X 25 Yeah, Paul Graham doesn't like X. Okay, we're slowly replacing it with spring spring Okay, there we go. You know when you create a place like this, I think you get to dictate little things like, you know, not liking X.

Yeah. So yeah, so we got to write out spring. Okay. But you know, I don't know, what do you think it should be? It could be P. Yeah. Maybe if it's not X, it's prompt. Do we have to go back to the mathematical notation

for this stuff? Maybe, yeah. Bring some like different, you know, we have the Y Combinator algorithm. That's right. We need a different algorithm to define the different seasons. I think that's right. I think just like different, you know, we have the white combinator algorithm. That's right Different algorithm to define the different seasons. I think I just forward, you know winter spring summer fall Yeah Well, I mean, it's the energy from the founders is really electric. Honestly, it's insane

Like downstairs we got a well the fun thing about hosting all of the investors in our house Is that I got a whole who's house our house chance downstairs So yeah, we got give us an overview of the we heard a little bit of your talk earlier But give us kind of a breakdown of how you introduced today. Yeah, absolutely. I mean dude. It's like 90% AI It's about 10% 11% hard tech, which is awesome And then the really crazy stat is you know how the last four batches about the last year? You know the batch itself as a whole has been growing revenue by 10% this time. It's 12 So we're actually inflecting up, and you know that's what you would expect

We're in the middle of the age of intelligence you know six months ago nine months ago You know the models were 90 IQ, and you know, then they were 110. Now they're about 130, you know, we're sort of entering super intelligence zone and Yeah, 400 IQ incoming. Yeah, that's right. That was a thousand, I don't even want to talk to that. But yeah, probably very valuable. I thought Sam's essay yesterday was very prescient in that, like, that's, that's sort of the silver lining, like everyone's sort of worried, you know,

what's gonna happen to the jobs. Like to me, what's gonna happen is the exact, I mean, it's actually an opening, right? Like the wild stat that we're seeing is actually the number of 18 to 22 year olds applying to YC and getting it is up 110% in year on year, right? So, you know. Is that driven by people liking to drop out of college or skipping college

entirely? Is that because they're they're viewing colleges kind of like, I mean, there was always a meme about like, Oh, what will you put YC in the education section of your LinkedIn? Now it's like, Oh wait, no, YC could actually be the replacement. Is that intentional? Well, the extreme meme here that is interesting to think about, like I don't believe this, but you know memes among you know the 18 to 22 year olds in particular is this might be the last time you can start businesses oh interesting because you know once super intelligence hits then You know the motes that you know the businesses that will exist will sort of

Ensconce like the seven powers of the motes out there. Sure, sure, they're just maximally efficient. Yeah, exactly. They just reach their terminal value immediately and maintain it forever. So you're trying to get network effects. You're trying to build. We're trying to get brand. You're trying to get a cornered resource.

And then the wildest thing here is that this perfect. Someone was telling me yesterday, right now if you look at college grads, the rate of unemployment for CS grads is actually 2x that of art history majors. I have not looked this up yet. Yeah, yeah. Everybody's quoting that. We've heard that too. We've talked about it. There might just be something crazy going on with art history majors. It's chat GBT hallucinating.

They found some hack and they're all getting employed. It's full employment for them. Very interesting. Question on the AI side. How are the companies feeling about the current battle between little tech and big tech? We saw with WWDC, it feels like Apple's kind of retreating from some territory. We could be seeing more opportunities for development. For like mobile apps.

We could see another mobile app boom because Apple's saying, hey look, maybe we're not the company to build every single AI experience on the iPhone. We're seeing new hardware maybe come from OpenAI. There's different stuff going on with open source. How, what's the interplay between the average YC company and the Mag 7 right now?

Oh, I mean, the good thing is we still have, you know, we have net neutrality. Yeah. So, and you know, that thing we've, we have seven companies in the you know mega tech world Yeah, but you know what like anyone can just put something on the internet and they get distribution Yeah, right So I think that you know the most important thing right now that I think all of us should really be considering is we need platform

Neutrality right you know the second that you know today you open your Siri And you don't get to choose you know do I want perplex want perplexity, do I want chat GPT on there? No, this is actually the next unfolding that needs to happen. We actually need the platforms to allow other people to enter. But if we do that, we can actually have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of companies, each of which can get to a billion dollars net revenue. And you could do it probably with 10 people.

So if you link up these two super mega trends, that's the future that we wanna live in. You can be 18 to 22, you don't necessarily have to go in, the credential matters a lot less. You know what matters now? It matters your agency and your taste. And you don't have to go and get anyone's permission for that. And in the nature of LLMs, you can actually get a better tutor from an LLM than you could

from at times working under somebody at some big company who would maybe explain, here's how you make a financial model for a software company. But now you can just talk enough with Chad GBT that you can probably figure it out even better than having a mentor in some cases. I want to ask about applying to YC. Have you noticed that the apps are becoming more GPT driven? Are people using AI to write their apps? Do you recommend against that? What do you think? I mean, if anything, like I think the best apps, you know, in the past, we might say, oh, this is AI slop. I think we're because the models are now smart enough like my writing process for instance has totally changed at this point like I am

you know you're actually able to come up with better ideas I think like you know I would rather I would rather people actually prompt to get like all of the ideas out there you know one of the things I've been using in chat GPT lately is like, give me 10 options for different concepts or ideas that might fit here. And then what I'm doing is I'm using my, like I'm using my prompting to do that.

And then on the backend, it'll give me like 10 things. Five of them make no sense. Two or three of them in my brain, I'm like, oh, I didn't think about that. That actually is a useful thing that I can put in with these other concepts that are in my Head yeah, and so I think it's actually You know the computer is a bicycle for the mind like if you can prompt really really well

You're using it. Just I mean you have to treat it like a vehicle Yeah, right it is not a destination of its own. It's actually you know it This is like the self-driving car for the mind. Yeah, I mean even just All that matters is the end output and if you're working on any type of project not working with a smart Collaborator yeah gonna lead to a worse output Yeah, condensing down these ideas because I've read a lot of apps where it's like wow There's actually like some really incredible KPIs in here But you buried it in paragraphs of exposition that were completely unnecessary.

And I know that the people that are actually reviewing the YC apps are not gonna read this far. And so just having it as a co-pilot seems like a really, really good thing. How have you and the other group partners pushed to guide the batch around reporting on revenue? There's a lot of conversation around what is ARR? It's sort of this flexible definition. There's obviously a lot of conversation around what is ARR? It's sort of this flexible definition.

There's obviously a lot of pressure for every founder coming into Demo Day to show results. How do you guys kind of guide founders on reporting? Yeah, absolutely. What we'd like people to do is put a contracted ARR, if it is. And then if it has an opt-out clause, where people can sort of get out, they should just have a little star on it. And it's like, opt out at 30 days or whatever.

I think it is very, very important that founders just don't engage in securities fraud. That's kind of a basic thing, right? So I think that it is a great. The amazing thing about the tech today is the demos are so impressive that people are willing to take a big chance. Big companies are willing to sign up for big deals.

And yeah, they obviously want some flexibility, but being really clear about that. I mean, these are non-GAAP metrics. That's right. There is some gray area. We need to define new metrics as we move forward. Are you seeing companies able to pivot more times within a single batch and just iterate faster to get to better outputs? Because historically, it wasn't unreasonable for a company to pivot a few times to get to something great and maybe they only have two weeks at the end to really sprint and

show progress. Sure, sure. Now I can imagine certain companies like really, really, really pushing it. Have you seen that at all? Yeah, I mean, something like 30% of the companies change their idea during the batch and that's actually great. Yeah, of course, you discover something as you're researching building yeah, and I think that that's always been true I mean some of the biggest companies end up being you know literally pivots from like two three weeks ago

Yeah, and then I think that you know People might say oh that you know that kind of sucks, or you know why is that I mean? I think it's good news. The good news is like you know You can just do things The good news is like, you know, you can just do things. The good news is like... So when I think of the YC mantras, I think build something people want, talk to your customers, is you can just do things. The third that we're adding is that important to have that volition, that agency. It's the distillation of agency, right?

I think so, yeah. I mean, a lot of it actually, I think the most important thing that I feel like everyone has to learn the hard way is to learn the sound of your own voice to say, not to get all bicameral mind about it. But that's sort of where we're at, actually. Do it. Well, no.

If you read P.G.'s old essays, one of the things that really jumps out at me is to what degree your childhood, your schooling, he has so many essays about what high school is like, being a nerd. All these things really spoke to me in that the process of becoming actually a founder is actually a journey inward to actually learn the sound of your own voice. You can make your own way. You can have agency, you know, just because,

I mean actually by definition, the startups that create new categories require a level of courage that like people have to find within themselves. Actually you have to say, actually you know what, like I know the Wall Street Journal says that. And you know, the hater D-cell journalists say this and all this stuff, you know the Wall Street Journal says that, and the hater-de-sell journalists say this, and all this stuff. You have to actually separate yourself from the default view of how the world works, and then you're actually trying to divine secret knowledge by going into the markets, going

to talk to people that have never even touched chat GPT yet. They don't know the rev- it's like that meme where you're in, you know, you're the tech guy like in the corner and then like everyone's dancing and they just don't know. They don't like, that's where we're at still. Like it won't be like that for another year or two, but like for now, that's still true. You go into any business in the world. They don't know this revolution is about to happen to them and we get to create it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Last demo day,

we talked to a company that was doing AI voice interactions to help the elderly process Medicare receipts essentially. And they discovered that the elderly were talking to their chat bots for like three hours. And that's just something that like, you might be able to predict intuitively, but I thought it was just a very funny discovery

that only happens from actually trying to build in that market with the latest and greatest technology. And that's what I love about YCDemo Day. What's your latest thinking on batch sizes? Are we staying where we're at? The high level is like we want as much prosperity in the world as possible. Brian Chesky is on my board. Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, Karen Levy. The board has given me my directives. It's, you know what, we need to, this is a tree of prosperity. Let's have the tree of prosperity grow. But you know, I think that

YC fundamentally is the managed marketplace. You look at an Airbnb, I still super interesting. I'm still bullish on Airbnb and that you look at the amount of space in the world, like the amount of space that has been listed on Airbnb is still a tiny fraction of what it could be and what does that unlock and it unlocks new experiences travel like a human like all these things you know a hundred billion dollar company from nothing and I think that the same thing is about to happen to innovation and venture but we have to do it thoughtfully, right? Like, you know, we're at demo day here.

We have more than a thousand of the top investors in the world all congregated here, right? We have a thousand people in this building and, um, you know, we need to grow them thoughtfully. Like we need, you know, what I need is I need YC to continue to provide returns, right? And, you know, uh, can't comment on you know the rumors about scale this week but like we need a lot more things like that and we're getting it like this is sort of uniquely the community where that happens. Talk to us about the two new partners that were added to the YC

partnership. Oh yeah there's three actually. Oh three. Yeah sorry. Andrew Mickles and John Hsu actually. Okay cool. Sorry I almost announced no yeah Tyler too. Okay yeah yeah that's Tyler too. I mean all of them created companies that exited for you know hundreds of millions to you know PagerDuty as you know a public company. Wow. You know north of a billion. That's remarkable. Those are exactly the kind of partners that we want at YC. It's like they've been there and they've done that. So roughly how big is the partnership now? It's a 15 partners total. Yeah that's great. Yeah. So you can still keep the actual like group It's like they've been there and they've done that so roughly how big is the partnership now? It's a 15 partners partners

Yeah, that's great. Yeah, so you can still keep the actual Like group size is fairly small within the back I mean, that's the main you can just basically guess it what the batch size will be because each partner can do 10 to 25 companies depending on how hard they want to work, but You know, I don't think it's a numbers game. I think we want to fund all the really, really good founders. And I feel a little bit embarrassed about we're accepting companies at a 0.8% rate right now.

Wow. 0.8%. And so I think that we're behind the eight ball, actually. I feel really good about this. We're going to keep growing what we got here. Yeah. But I also need to grow the partnership. And then we need to fund better and better companies.

And then, you know, this is a 10, 20, 50, 100 year thing. Like we're trying to build Y Combinator into a multi hundred year institution. And we need it. Have you had any companies go through this batch and decide not to raise additional capital at this point because they're just making so much revenue that they have a need for?

I mean, famously, Tom funded Axiom last batch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're doing hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah, hundreds of millions of dollars in pure profit. So. I saw that and I was like trying to look back through our stream and like, did we have them on? I mean, crypto's wild, man.

Yeah, it's a wild west. It's a wild west. That was insane. Yeah. Well, we'll let you get back to it. Thank you so much for coming on the stream. Thanks for having me. Yeah. That's always a pleasure. It's an honor. Yeah. That's great.

Have fun out there. Thanks. Great. Well, we will be moving into interviews with founders and VCs who are coming on the show who are here at YC Demo Day. This... Stay moggin. Stay moggin. Stay moggin.

While we bring in the first, oh we're ready, let's do it. We're on it, let's go. Fantastic, I thought we were gonna have to do news. What up? What up? What up y'all? Welcome to the show.

Nice to see ya. I'm John, welcome. Nice to see ya. Nice to see ya. How you doing? What's going on? Break it down for us. How we doing?

Break it down for us, how's doing? Break it down for us. How's demo day going? Grab a water. Introduce yourselves. Introduce your company, please. All right. Ken. Ken.

Hold up the microphone a little bit. Both of you guys. All right. There you go. Good. Ken. Cool. CEO of Kaizen.

Nice. Michael, CTO. OK. What do you guys do? Did you guys just pitch like five minutes ago or 10 minutes ago? Yeah. Amazing.

Five minutes ago, we came right down here to spread the word. Yeah. How were the nerves? You guys, was that like a walk in the park? Yeah, it was fun. like five minutes ago or 10 minutes ago. Five minutes ago we came right down here to spread the word, yeah. How were the nerves? You guys, was that like a walk in the park? Yeah, it was fun. It was fun. You've done it in alumni and then probably like three to five full partnership pitches before, right?

Yes. So I mean I probably said this a hundred times, a thousand times almost it feels like. Well you gotta say it one more time. Give us the high level. You don't have to give us the whole pitch, but break it down. All right, so Kaizen helps developers instantly integrate into websites without APIs.

You know, we work with companies across logistics, healthcare, and financial services to integrate to a wide variety of legacy portals. Very cool, talk to me about how you're doing that, is there MCP involved, are you kind of using AI and LLMs to read the HTML, kind of reverse engineer an API from the front end, what's going on? 100%, the latter of what you said. Computer use has changed the HTML, kind of reverse engineer an API from the front end. What's going on?

100%, the latter of what you said. Computer use has changed the game a lot of this stuff. You know, you think about it, hey, there's such a small subset of software that has APIs that people can integrate with, build products on top of. But now with computer use, computers can do anything, anything available on the internet,

and that's what we help companies do. We have reactions to O3 Pro. Have you tested it yet? Is it improving things? Or do you build on open source? Like's what we help companies do. Reactions to 03 Pro, have you tested it yet? Is it improving things or do you build on open source? Like what do you like, what are you excited about in the AI race at the foundation model level? Yeah, I mean we love using all of them. We're friends, we're Switzerland, right?

Google, Google, Anthropic. We feel the same way, we'll have them all on the show. You're like, please let the fox in the hen house. We're supposed to. I mean, truly, different models are different for different things. Clicking on an item on the page, we get the computer use model for enthralic for that.

Pulling data from a very large table, Gemini, they come and clutch a little there. Is that because of the bigger context window? Exactly, 100%. So our approach, we abstract all this away from the end use. Because they don't got to think about it. It just happens. So walk me through some of those use cases.

What's the first customer that you've had that has been like, this solved my problem, this is amazing. Walk me through a very concrete demo. One of our favorite customers to talk about is they're a voice agent for hotels. So in the Rio, the hotel in Vegas, they call down, You say, hey, I want a burger up to my room. Or I don't know what kind of fancy stuff you all order. Yeah, you'll talk to a voice agent. And the voice agent will take your request.

And they'll use Kaizen. Like calling to get like two. Last night we were staying at the Rosewood, of course. Surprise on the reds. We called to get toothpaste. And we're like, it's like, you know, I don't even want to wait like, I don't know, 20 seconds while it rings and oh let me transfer you here and all that stuff,

you should just be able to pick up a toothpaste please, and it just comes. Exactly. So how does your service integrate with that experience? Because I know I pick up the phone, I'm talking to a voice agent, I imagine you're using voice APIs to actually mediate that, but then you're designing that interaction, right?

Or rather, our customer is traversing, maybe I want to shout them out. They are a voice agent for hotels. Okay, great. And then they use us to write the data back into the property management system, create that service order. So then a toothpaste goes right up to your room.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, instead of talking to a person and they're trying to understand you, all this stuff, it just happens instantly. What were you guys doing before this? We were, I was head of engineering at a company called truck Smarter. I've worked with small trucking companies my whole career. Love them. Great. Big truck guy. Big truck. Lots of experience working with legacy systems. Yeah, exactly.

That's where it comes from. Every shipper in the United States is a completely different website. I must have written dozens of these. I managed teams, I wrote hundreds. And probably a lot of web scraping. Exactly. But now you're onto the next thing. And we're building Kaizen so that no one has to do that again. Let's do it again. I love it. There we go.

Talk to us about the metrics. Did you share a headline number of users, ARR, something to get the investors excited today? Yeah. I mean, we're in the hundreds of thousands of dollars of ARR. Let's start working on this. Yeah, let's blow. We got all the acronyms, all. We started working on this. Yeah, let's go. We got all the acronyms, all this, you know, with the A16Z. Like, did you get them all?

You're tracking it. You guys got term sheets yet? Yes. We're close. All right. We have them. We have them. Oh!

The first term sheet of the TVP and Waxie Devon. Congratulations. I love this. I love this. These things are spreading so much debris across the room. It's terrible. Anyway, thanks for playing along with us. Guys, this is awesome.

We're super excited for you. That's awesome. What's next on the build out? How big is the team? I imagine you're raising money. You're going to scale that? Or are you building a much smaller team? How are you thinking about that?

Yeah, this is a massive opportunity and we're excited to sprint after it. We actually have an employee right now. Yeah, crazy enough to join us during the batch with the 500k in the bank account. We're doing a work trial tomorrow. So we have the money, we gotta go spend it and then we're gonna build a big business.

Fantastic, we're rooting for you. Amazing guys, congratulations. Thanks so much for coming on. Yeah, good luck. Thank you. We're rooting for you. Amazing, guys. Congratulations. Thanks so much for coming on. Yeah. Good luck. Thank you. Good luck, man. My man.

Good stuff, guys. Thanks, Johnny. We'll see you. Fantastic. These party poppers are a big problem. It basically was spraying little shards of paper everywhere. But we'll keep doing it. We're not going to stop.

As long as it didn't go in my red bowl, I think we're good. Let's ideally bring in the next person. You want to come on. Let's let's let's come on Okay, we got some people coming into the stream the YC demo day stream 2025. Welcome to the stream We come on come on and sit down So we've emailed or chatted before right, right? Yes. Yes. Back in the stack share days. So now I don't know your history, by the way. I was talking to a bunch of founders. They were like, what? Yeah. He did what? Silicon Valley for over a decade. Why see 2012 my batch 12 times, but this we're here to talk about your batch, what are you building, introduce yourselves.

All right, so we are building Cursor for DevOps. Okay. Basically the challenge right now is you're using Cursor and it's like this futuristic agentic experience, right? And then as soon as you leave the code editor, Pull the microphone up a little bit. You're back in the past. And so you're dealing with broken CI builds, you're dealing with exceptions, you're dealing with outages

like service outages from pager duty. All of those things are manual. So what we're doing is we're bringing AI agents to all of your developer tools outside of the code editor. Okay. Walk me through how that actually works because in cursor I'm in the IDE. Am I, are you puppeteering the AWS dev interface? Or are you operating at a lower level? What's the actual interface? Are you rune-pilled? Is this like a text is the universal interface play?

Yeah. So basically you land on a developer homepage. Okay. And you see all of your tasks from across those tools. So like exceptions from Sentry. And then you see an auto-fix button. Okay. For each of those tasks from across those tools. So like exceptions from Sentry. And then you see an auto fix button for each of those tasks. So it's like a priority inbox

that prioritizes everything across those developer tools and then gives you one click action. How much of what you're doing requires just building on top of an API for something like PagerDuty or actually doing a deal with them to integrate at a deeper level or just puppeteering and computer use. Not even, they're never none the wiser.

Yeah, so we're actually doing both, right? So some of the dev tools haven't built out a lot of agentic features, so we're building on top of their API and then other partners, like one of our first integrations is with Sentry and we integrate with Sentry AI. Yeah. Okay. I remember Sentry. Yeah. Cool.

Did you guys come in with this idea? Did you have to iterate to it? How, what did that look like? Yeah, we did. Yeah, we came in with it. So, so before this, uh, uh, Daniel here, um, at Netflix, uh, I was on the team that built the internal developer portal, which was the most used engineering tool at Netflix. That helped accelerate the company. You probably heard that they ship ads and live streaming and all these things,

and it really helped the organization move faster. Everyone thought that they were going to have to partner with Microsoft, and I think they wound up doing it internally because they were moving so fast, right? Yeah, that's exactly right. That's a great narrative about Netflix. Exactly, right? So it really helped accelerate the team,

and that had no AI. No AI in it, right? And you can squeeze all that productivity. So then really helped accelerate the team, and that had no AI. No AI in it, right? And you can squeeze all that productivity. So then Jonas and I were chatting, we're like, wait, what if we did this developer first, we did it with AI, how productive could you make engineers? You just go from cursor to star sling, and you're just talking to agents.

You're just slinging, slinging bit. Slinging the stars. What is the go-to-market motion? Cursor obviously just goes bottoms up directly to the dev. Is this something that a DevOps engineer can bring in or do you need to go through a CTO, get approval before you do an enterprise deal? Any developer can actually just sign up

for your accounts and start using it. The beautiful part is this isn't for DevOps engineers. This is actually for all the engineers that have to touch those tools. And so it's like pretty much every engineer at the modern software engineering org can just sign up on their own without talking to anyone else and still using the product. How's the progress? Are you live? Are you growing? What metrics did you share with the Demo Day crew today?

Yes. So less than a month ago we launched and we have over 400 companies that have signed up for the private beta including DoorDash, Snowflake, Golden Zaks. Golden Zaks? Yeah. Golden. There we go. Let's give it up for big clients.

Everyone wants agents. Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. Where are you guys going from here? Did you close the round already? Yes, we have closed it. There we go.

There we go. There we go. Yes, yes, yes. We're happy to give you these ramp-outs. Awesome. Thank you guys. Enjoy. Delivity addition. So we put the money in ramp.

Yes, exactly. Exactly. Awesome. That's incredible. What's next for the company? You guys hiring, scaling. We're hiring very slowly. How big is the company right now?

It's just the two of us. Just the two of you. The class of the old school YSC. This is the way it was. Now there's folks coming through with 25 employees. Yeah, no, no. We incorporated right after getting into YSE. Really? No way. Awesome. We were like, alright, the two of us, we're just going to build the MVP. What were you doing before, by the way? So I started a company called StackShare. It was a developer community. Yeah. We scaled it to over a million developers. By the end of the journey, it was used to over a million developers by the end of the journey was used by over 40 million developers Yeah, and we think we did like an interview. Yes The soylent tech stack. Yeah

How the hell you shipping all these calories and so we talked about all the tools Yeah, so yeah, it was a big developer community and then sold the company last year. Awesome. Yeah You guys are in an incredible position. I'm feeling really good about this. You should be confident. It's going to be hard, but I think the confidence should be high. It's a good market. It's amazing how much we can get done now just with two people.

Yeah. Right? It's never been done before, so we're excited. It also feels like an interesting market in that we've seen it's just less monopolistic. It's not like trying to break through a social network where it's like you're either a trillion dollar company or zero.

Like I feel like in DevOps, in enterprise, like you can understand the roadmap ahead. Chop would create a great product and carve out like a fantastic business. That's why we see so many companies going public every year, so many DecaCorns in this category. So congratulations. Thank you man.

You all should be keeping an eye out for in this seeing you guys. We're huge TBP fans. Come on the next time you guys are funny. Only podcast you should be watching if you're a founder. There we go. Have a great rest of your day. Good luck. We'll see you guys soon. Alright. And we will bring in the next crew. Stoke for you guys. Oh yeah, bring the phone out. We're going to run out of those. How many more do we have? We have a variety of goodies. Oh, I love the sweatshirts.

You're owning a color. There we go. Ramp-Owns, yellow. You guys are owning pink. You can have those if you want. Feel free. They're limited edition to this demo day. You can only get them this year.

There we go. There we go. The colors are working together perfectly. Roughly the same saturation. Roughly everything's the same. Roughly the same saturation. On the orange background. On the orange page.

Yeah, this is a fever drain. I'm so sorry, dog. This jazz berry, it feels kind of vintage. It feels like I've known it. I've known it. What are you guys building? Yeah, bring it down. Oh, we're building an AI agent for bug finding.

OK. So right now we have a PR bot. So you make a pull request, we'll take your code, clone it into a sandbox, and then we let an agent just go ham at it. Okay. And then we tell you how we break it. Okay.

There we go. How much of this is just about speeding up the pace of development versus like, is there a pen testing angle here? Is that just a completely separate cybersecurity play? No, I think we do some pen testing. Okay. So it's we want to basically find any kind of bug. Yeah. So a lot of people take like a limited approach at bug finding so they ever do like coverage testing or they try and find integration bugs. Yep. We really want to basically build an agent that

can do any of that or kind of what's best for your tool. Okay, talk to me. So you like when people are vibe coding because they're just creating bugs all the time? Exactly. We're just like, keep vibe coding. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, we love vibe coders. We're here to help you make better code.

No problems with the whatsoever as long as you buy our software. Yeah, yeah. You vibe code, we'll test it. Then you take our output, you put it back into cursor Talk to me about the pro the prompts that you're using to actually have the agent go and hammer it Like I imagine that that's not just try and find a bug. You've probably gotten very don't make mistakes What goes into actually getting an agent to effectively hunt for bugs? Yeah, so like the most important part is just to have like a sandbox where it can like, it can run code, it can compile your code, it can run like unit tests.

And so then we just get the agent to go ham and each time that it like runs a small experiment on your code, it learns a little bit more and it's able to do, run a better test the next time. And so it's able to search a repository, able to run commands to see if you've, changes you made actually were propagated through all the files. So we found a bug which was that someone updated a path

but didn't update it everywhere. And so that was these sorts of things. So the agent's able to run these, like any command that a person would. Yeah, are you doing stuff like trying to stuff multiple variables in a single function, like that type of stuff where there isn't as much fault tolerance built into the code, maybe they need like a, you know,

if else try except clause in there or something like that. Is that the type of bugs that you're trying to find or is it more about scalability of code, like okay, you're making a database call right here, it looks fine now, but if we scale this up and there's a lot of demand, you're going to get cooked. I think it really depends.

So we use the pull request as kind of the initial seed. So what change you make there kind of determines the path that we use for testing. So if you're trying to scale, then yeah, we'll kind of test as if you're trying to scale. But if you're making path changes, we'll test as if you're making path changes. One if you're making path changes, we'll test as if you're making path changes. One of the things we find is like Vibe coding,

often there's a different flavor of bugs that are happening because of Vibe coding. So they don't, LLMs don't make the same kind of errors that people do. Because people, with people code grows organically. LLMs is like one-shotting things. So it'll often like forget to add functions. So it's not as easy as pointing to a line

and going, this variable's wrong. It's like, no, no, you fundamentally missed this whole section of things you were supposed to implement. Got it. So yeah, I think it's- Okay, talk to me about the go-to-market motion. Is this just a landing page you're driving traffic to and people sign up by themselves?

Are you doing founder-led sales, all of the above? No, no, we're landing page, like this is our go to market right now. Go to Gatsby. Go to Gatsby.ai. Go sign up. Yes, go sign up. Yeah, you can just go, you install the bot,

we have a seven day free trial. Okay. So it's, there's no. Consumption versus seat based pricing, what are you thinking? Yeah, it's seat based pricing. Okay. So for every developer, it's 20 bucks a month.

Okay. Just simple kind of flat rate. Are you running into cost problems? Because we've seen this, like, you know, the latest and greatest LLM comes out, it's really expensive. GPT-03 just dropped by 80%, so anyone who is having a problem with their cost is probably fine right now.

But how are you thinking about that side? Yeah, you go first. Yeah, we found that, like, actually, for just, like, you know, running lots? Yeah, you go first. Yeah, we found that actually for just running lots of experiments on your code to find bugs, that it's actually better just to have a really fast and small model. Okay. And so we haven't had these sorts of problems yet.

So what does that mean? Like Llama, fine-tuned? We've talked to LLM training companies that have trained even smaller models, like just for JSON to, you know, for that have trained even smaller models, like just for JSON to, you know, for formulation, or just translation models, or just profanity finding. Are you thinking about going so small

you could run it on a gaming GPU, or are we still talking about like the big boys? Yeah, so like right now it's, we've actually gotten like a lot of mileage out of Gemini Flash. We started by, you know, we're fine-tuned with RL, a model that was specifically good at using tools. We started by, we're fine-tuned with RLA model. That was specifically good at using tools.

And so yeah, we're getting ready to do that. Once we find all our pain points exactly in our current architecture, we can train the exact right thing. And the smaller, faster models that are targeted for the specific use case are better. What were you guys doing before YC? We were both researchers.

So I was doing research in software testing using large language models. And Matteo was doing his PhD in reinforcement learning and formal methods. Very nice. Yeah so our kind of research has come together to make this happen. How are the metrics, how's the raise coming together, how's the pitch for demo day, what are the goals? Excited about demo day, goals are raise a lot of money here. Let's go. Good luck. We're going big. Bring some big napkins around. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Just do it here. Perfect. And then yeah, we're slowly kind of growing. Well, I haven't said slowly. We've doubled our growth kind of every week for the past kind of couple weeks. Nice. That's a better way to frame it. There we go. But yeah, we've gotten, I think we're up to like 18 different kind of companies using our tool. That's great.

So yeah, it's been awesome. Cool. Well, good luck to you. 1,800 soon. Yes, yeah. After this, when all of you go subscribe, yeah, then we'll be at 1,800. Fantastic.

Well, thanks, boys. Congratulations. Yeah, yeah. It's been a pleasure. Yeah. We'll talk to you soon. Show the Crocs off, too. Show the Crocs.

Oh, he's got the full fashion. Boom, boom. Completely done everything. Let's bring in the next team. How you guys doing? Welcome to the stream. Oh, they've got the shirts. Oh, you have the rare panel on? The shirts are out.

Did you miss out? You need one? I need one. Thank you. Welcome. Eddie. Nice to meet you guys. Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you. Logan, nice to meet you guys. Logan Sharp, thank you for tucking your shirts in. We're keeping a respectful out here. Okay, introduce the company. What are we much. We're keeping a respectful out here. Okay, introduce the company. What are we building? So we're Kotool.

We are building AI agents for security teams. Cool, sorry. We're building AI agents for security teams. Okay, is specifically cyber security teams, are we talking DDoS, are we talking somebody goes in and tries to steal secrets, steal data? What are we talking about? So like, you know, you can think of cybersecurity

as split into like AppSec and OpSec, where AppSec's like, you know, defending, you know, your deployed software out into the world AppSec and OpSec where AppSec is like you know defending you know the your deployed software out into the world and then OpSec is like operational security right where it's like you know protecting your employees from phishing. We're definitely more on the automation side for the OpSec side of house and think of like basically like allowing security teams to like triage their tickets a lot faster for like impossible travel problems or for like you know. Oh impossible

travel problems that's like a that's like a buzzword for Oh, yeah, it's like you know Eddie signed in from Singapore. Is that legit or not? Yeah, well he was in the office earlier today. He couldn't have possibly on there cuz I travel doesn't exist exactly It's gonna get a whole lot more problems. When you get from LA to Tokyo in two hours, everyone's gonna be like, well, I guess he did log in from Tokyo. He was going for sushi. It's funny because I think a lot of people

have this hacker aesthetic in their mind when they think of cybersecurity, which is a lot of in the movies, fucking around on a terminal or something like that. And it's just like, when in reality, it's like most of the time, it's people triaging tickets day in and day out and that kind of thing. So our goal is basically to automate a lot of the BS

that these teams have to go through and a lot of the annoying stuff and then allow them to get back to work. So what's the go-to-market motion? Are you doing enterprise deals, founder-led sales, selling to other YC companies? What's the scale of company that needs to use your product? Our first customer was Ramp.

Oh, Rinoa! Wow, let's go baby. Wow. That's hilarious. I mean, that's tough. You're kind of starting that. That's tough. We gotta keep the family. Yeah. Time's hilarious. I mean, that's tough. You're kind of starting at the top. We've got to keep it in the family.

Time is money, say both. Come on. There we go. That's right. That's right. I mean, Eric Ramp is just an incredible CEO. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's great.

He's a YC alum. Yeah. But the most is we really want to embed with the most cutting edge, the best teams like Ramp, that can actually inform us as much as we're helping them on how the best teams operate. Wow. And so we're looking for sort of tech forward. Enterprise is totally awesome, but anyone that's pushing the boundaries and what's possible automation-wise.

What does the integration point look like? Is it a single security person at a company can get set up or is it something that needs to be deployed throughout the enterprise and has a much more like staged rollout? Yeah, I think basically where it is, is like ideally what we would have is is like we'd probably first like start working with like your detection and response team

and like get that team plugged in. Basically like we're, you know, we're heavily leveraging AI tool callings. The idea is just like we plug into all the different points in your Slack, think like Okta, think like Panther, think like all of these different products kind of thing. And basically then what we're able to do is deploy out, allow these teams to write their own agents,

so they're in there customizing their own system prompts and all this kind of stuff to go out and tackle their tasks day to day. So I think the initial go-to-market motion is work with these high-tech teams who are really used to automating already, and then basically build up a nice collection of agents, kind of start getting a good network effect,

Ikea effect, where people are building their own agents, sharing them out into the world. And then from there, we can kind of move out to wider and wider and less technical teams, where it's basically we can start to plug into people's stacks and wholesale automate out of the gate and solve a lot of these problems. How did you two meet?

So we grew up together in Santa Barbara, California. We have lived together since we went to school. But yeah, our third co-founder is just outside. He's probably watching this right now. But yeah, we were really stoked when you guys watched our launch video. Oh yeah. We did? We were the mole. Wait, you guys are that company? They did the the Ripley deal. That was the single best ad. That was incredible. That was the single best ad I've seen this year. 100%.

No, we were pumped on that. Because there were so many ways to do that and have it be just bad. Oh, yeah. It could have been bad a million ways. But it was tasteful. It was funny. It was funny. It was perfectly timed.

Yeah, it just made it funny. Where did that come from? Well, so it's funny. We were scared it was going to flop, to be honest. We didn't know how it would land and we're happy with how it did. We came with the idea, we worked with one of my friends growing up, does comedy in LA, and I live in LA, but she knew a director who was amazing, and his friends who were also actors and stuff got in and acted for us, and so it all came together with friends of friends.

It looked incredibly polished. Can you give us an order of magnitude on the budget for that thing? It was, let's see, five digits. Five digits, but not six. Extremely low, extremely low. Extremely low five digits. We were able to work.

It looked like a $100,000 project. But it was actually pretty funny. We showed, the original idea came from Gary, actually Gary actually showed him the demo on the first week of And he's just like we started like showing him how you can like query slack and that kind of stuff He's like oh you guys got to do the right thing And then we showed him like the final cut like the night before we went with it He's like you guys should tweak these Like YC on YC on YC

Look like they're gonna sort their thing out. You guys are just having Catalyzed around for you guys I think a ton of investor inbound off that Yeah, no, no, it. It really grounds it because not everyone works in cybersecurity every day. It can be a little abstract. There we go! There we go.

There we go, boys. Let's go. What do you do with that? You push it up or something? Yeah, we're figuring out. We got a lot of these. Congratulations. Exactly.

I'm super excited for you guys. I think we've got to give them a different hat for this. I mean, it's the best. Oh, man. We can give you two of these. Oh, let's go. Let's go. Let's go. It's a special hat for this. I mean, this is the best. Oh, man. Yeah, we can give you two of these. Let's go. Let's go. It's a special edition.

Congratulations. Thank you so much. Really great chat with you guys. Yeah, great chat with you. Super excited for you. We'll follow up. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Let's go.

Cheers. Cheers. That was fantastic. I'm so glad we got to talk to those guys. That was such a good thing. Out of the year. Out of the year. Out of the year, right now.

And right at the perfect time, because we were just hitting peak vibreel, right? Yeah, right and if they dropped it even a month later Welcome to the stream. I'm John nice to meet you Everyone died Story about PNF or die if they died Never lock yourself in a room for the 90 days. Move to sunny San Francisco, do YC. That's our recommendation. Anyway, please introduce yourselves in the company. Yeah, I'm Tom. I'm Eric. You guys look, you're not related at all, right? We're not related. You can go by brothers.

People ask us, people ask us. We're your brothers. Yeah, yeah, people ask us. What does the company do? We're doing a agentic people search. So we have a database, people database of around 200 million people. And we use agentic search to search over that

for companies and businesses to do like sales, recruiting, GTM. And so are we talking about specifically like I am a recruiter and I need a sales person and I'm going to go to you to try and hire them? No, no, so basically like you can put in a criteria. Like essentially what we do is Hold the microphone up.

Yeah, here, push the microphone a little bit closer to you. Yeah, there you go. Essentially what we do is we like deploy an LLM, assign every profile to that LLM and then given your criteria, that could be like one paragraph long, we just ask an LLM, assign every profile to that LLM, and then given your criteria, that could be one paragraph long, we just ask the LLM if this profile meets that criteria, and then we build a load distributor

to run 10,000 LLM calls in parallel. To do that at scale, we can search over five million pro profiles in 30 minutes. Okay, so walk me through one of the key examples. I'm sure this is live, you have customers. What's an example of someone using this? So for example, we had a query come in yesterday, actually, it was just like, every founder that was acquired,

that was a CTO of their startup, was acquired by Databricks or Snowflake in the last three years, and they still work there. And there's only probably like 25 people in the world that fits that profile, and we found all 25 of them okay by using because we can use and have an LLM going just like because we have like we can throw as much compute at the problem as we want interesting and then the LLMs get better the more compute you throw out. It's interesting to be able to find you're able to find

information that is historically effectively impossible to find without doing all the work that you guys did. Makes sense. So who's who what buyer or what buyer archetype within an enterprise or business is most excited to buy your product? Yeah I mean like mega recruiters by far. Recruiting firms? Yeah no just like people that you know or like a big recruiter at at me. I mean we work with Core You know like like just like people hunting for talent, but it's like a generalized type skill, right? So for example, you know like an AI labs training a new voice model and they need like people that speak Cantonese It's like, okay. I find me every Cantonese speaker in the US that has like a podcast presence

Yeah, and like okay great. These guys can come here in our voice models, right? Like that's kind of bad. Yeah, wild. Or they might even need someone who speaks Cantonese and also is an expert in biology. Yeah, yeah. So they can talk about the biology terms. And that's something that, how are you gonna search for that?

It's so funny, because I run these type of queries in my own head where I'm like, we need a videographer who's in LA that has experience in film, but you know. I mean, but he's also part of Teapot. That's basically what we need. It has a sense of humor. How would you even know that?

Well, if you look through their posts, I'm sure you could figure that out. It's basically as close as you can. If you just give a criteria to a human recruiter. So you can imagine 5,000 human recruiters manually looking over profiles and then, you know. Okay, business model. Are you, most recruiting firms, they charge on like a per fee basis,

$30,000 to place an engineer somewhere. Are you doing like a seat based pricing, consumption based pricing? This sounds expensive if you're talking about running 20 million LLM queries at the same time. It's actually not as expensive as people think because open source models have gotten so good. Okay.

Yeah, I'm guessing like, you know, any deep research query costs us like $10 maybe. Okay. But then we recharge for conversion with our B2B customer. A conversion. Okay. Yeah. We recharge by conversion for B2B customers. Cool. So that's probably pretty expensive. It's great. Yeah. And also we have a platform that's just available to everybody. Got it. So they can pay us a subscription fee search as much as they want They're cool to email rich my phone number We need a guest that doesn't hate tech

To meet what we do before I see yeah, so we met in elementary school actually so we were originally from Canada Let's go when an elementary school and I'm elementary school actually so we were originally from Canada let's go we went in elementary school and we became close friends. Brain drain. Brain drain. Yeah it's been great here but um we became close friends when Eric he uninstalled Windows on my computer and I was really pissed at him for a day and then we fixed it so then we became great friends after that.

You couldn't load anything? You didn't even have homework to do? I had homework. It was during school and then. You couldn't load anything? You didn't even have homework to do? I had homework. It was during school. Ultimate prank, uninstall Windows on your best friend's computer. Boys being boys. We spent one semester at college each.

I was at Penn, he was at UC San Diego. And then come January we were both like, why are we even there? So it was 18, 19? We're both 18 right now. Wow, here we go. What's the. Here we go. That's unusual. What's the youngest team that you've met here besides yourselves?

17. 17? There is a high school senior. OK. I didn't even follow them. They got here. I met one at dinner the other day. I'm doing some robotics.

It is getting younger. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we have a bottle of wine here. We're going to give it to you. Here it is in the youngest. I'm for it. Yeah.

Not yet. We'll receive them from you. Hopefully, you're not going back through YC in three years. Hopefully you're at the NASDAQ or something. Talk to me about traction, metrics, anything that you're sharing here at Demo Day, anything to get the venture capitalists excited. Yeah. 270 paying customers.

Wow. So I don't know if you guys heard about Linked. Linked? No. So a very early version of this product relaunch, which is like Rank Stanford, like Stanford Rank. Okay. Which was, so we basically built this, we basically scraped the entire alumni database of Stanford.

I'm sure they love that. Yeah, they're okay with it. We put it online, and then we had this app where people can see two random alumni next to each other. And then you vote for who's more cracked. Who's more cracked. And that version of the app picked up like 80,000 users was how we got into YC and stuff. And then we came down here, 207 paying customers, about 16,000. My monthly recurring revenue since three weeks ago.

Yeah, guys. No, but yeah. Wow. Is the team just you two right now? So there's three of us. We're two convoy. Our founding engineer is from high school. He just graduated.

The same high school. The same high school. Yeah, we all went to the same high school. That's amazing. Yeah. There he is. No, I'm super excited for you guys. Congratulations on YC.

Thank you. We're going to get on the product. And I actually have a bunch of people to send this to. Yeah, this is fantastic. You should give it a try. Fantastic. Thank you so much. Yeah.

We'll talk to you soon. Awesome, guys. I'm sure meeting you guys. Fantastic. Let's bring in the next team if we have one. Come on down. How you doing? Aaron, what's up?

Hey, how you doing? So this what's up? How you doing? So this is a YC alumni. Oh, fantastic. He just raised a Series A today. Congratulations. Here, sit down. Yeah, we just raised a Series A. Here, sit here.

Yeah, so we were trying to make this happen for the last week. Amazing. But he just announced his Series A today, $17 million. $17 million. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. I mean, we have stuff to celebrate $17 million.

I already got the hat. So here we go. I mean, we have stuff to celebrate 17 years. I already got the hat. I got the hat. Here we go. Hey! Hey! Congratulations. Seems like you've done that a couple times. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is the biggest round of the day. This is the biggest round. All right, all right. Who did the round? How far along are you? How big is the company? Give me some stats. Yeah, yeah, okay.

So 8VC did the round. By the way, guys, this is awesome. I did the interview with VentureBeat, and I'm way more starstruck Yes, ABC led the round Absolute dog what partner are you working with Jack Moskovitz? He's fantastic. Um, yeah. Yeah, so how far along so we're And were you in the last batch? We know we were a couple batches ago. We were summer 23.

Cool. Great vintage. Was that still remote? Excellent vintage. Or was that back in person? No, we were the first back. Back, there you go. We had an advantage in that.

Very nice. But yeah, so Outset does AI moderated research. So what does that mean? It's like when big companies have to do a ton of research, Nestle has to go figure out whether they should launch this weird version of DiGiorno pizza or something. They go do research. So either they're running massive surveys

and they're getting very low fidelity data, they really know much, it's just a bunch of numbers, or they're running interviews and that's where it's a one-on-one interview with everybody, right? Which is not actually cost effective. So now you can run AI led interviews. So that means AI's leading the conversation, digging in, following up, probing deeper

and synthesizing all of that for you. And that for you. How big is the legacy market? So the research market is like a hundred and forty billion. It's actually a really big one. Yeah, there's like huge companies that you probably may have never heard, like Ipsos and Contar, and these like big guys that are just kind of sitting there. So there's a lot of opportunity. And yeah, we work with Microsoft, Nestle, Weight Watchers. So we've been super enterprise-focused. And yeah, we're a couple years in. What are the interaction patterns that you like

or you think are kind of unlocked by AI? I imagine that voice phone calls is top of mind versus like forums, which was always available and already computerized, essentially. It's actually, I think the cooler thing is what you can get from participants and synthesize. So it's like, so now we do video interviews and audio and they can even share their screen. Yeah, all of that is being ingested. And then like people ask like, to say I have an avatar when it's interviewing.

And we actually did research and people don't want that. They don't want the avatar. No, they don't want the avatar. Yeah, that would be obvious. Like weird uncanny valley stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that would make sense. And you're just like a random- People are used to phone calls.'re like I'm used to phone calls

Yeah, people used to phone calls and they're fine sharing their video But like if you suddenly see an AI you're like, I'm trying to make you know, 15 bucks doing some research totally Suddenly see that you're gonna be all weirded out Much better to have AI come through with voice and tech. Yep. Talk to me about recruiting. You said 15 bucks That's enough to get someone to jump on but how do they even find out that 15 bucks is on the table? Yeah, so we partner with a number of different companies that do nothing but panels. Like nothing but... And recruiting.

Nothing but recruiting. So you have user interviews and prolific... And then they probably get some demographics and some basics. They get all that. And they have millions of people that are ready to... It's like gig work, right? And so they connect. Okay, and you know, 100,000 people that drink energy drinks to give me feedback.

Exactly, exactly. And you can do all that through our platform. Is there a certain unlock when an AI doesn't need to like, you know, if a human is scheduling research calls, you know, you can imagine they do like four 30 minute blocks and then they take a little break and they do some more or something like that. I don't know how it works,

but an AI could hypothetically talk for hours and hours and hours and hours, like kind of the longest. Yeah, 100% so there's like you know I think a lot of AI stuff is like oh where can it replace the human thing and now it's cheaper but actually like this this is taking on the stuff that like humans can't physically do we only have 24 hours in a day and so it happens that people use it to like interview 500 people right in a day or two and that's literally not possible it's like just a lot of physics don't

allow it yeah and so they're able to do that they can do multilingual they kind of do it all at once so you can wind up like unlocking actual like stuff you've never heard I don't can I curse on this oh we usually don't but stuff that they would not have uncovered anywhere else yeah and they actually are able to get that like in this way yeah what's your what's your stack under the hood? What models are you using? Getting the most value out of it.

Yeah, we're using a combination. So it's like, we're hitting multiple models constantly, but Azure, we're using a lot of Azure, actually opening up models under the hood through Azure. Yeah. Is your model router helpful? I saw they announced that it builds. I haven't talked to anyone that's actually used it.

I don't know yet, actually. So I don't think we've planned it yet. So basically what we need is just an incredible amount of reliability because what we'll have is three customers are all running 500 simultaneous interviews. So we have to actually scale very, very quickly. And also a lot of our customers, the nestlings of the world, they care a lot about super safe, super reliable.

So we wind up needing the Azure. Yeah, and then you're also probably going through like peak LLM usage hours in the middle of night no no process in our own time but then we also fall back to opening I we use Gemini for sure so we're like hitting a lot yeah talk about the the is the voice modality beyond the uncanny valley at this point? Is that why voice is valuable? Are you using voice a lot? Because you can imagine that this might have been possible via text interactions.

You're texting your responses back and forth. Probably get more out of a voice interaction. Are we just, if we talk to you again in like two years, do you think you'll be like, okay, yeah, now I'm a believer in the avatar thing because it is photoreal? Okay, so two things. So one, right now what matters most is obviously the modality of the participant. Like if you think about like all we care about

is the most deep, like thoughtful, in-depth data that we can like pull from you. The response. The response. Yeah, yeah. And that's gonna be way better than text. And that's way better than text. Our first product that we like.

You gotta get them talking. Yeah, our first like pilot with Weight Watchers back in 2023 was like all text and it was actually pretty good But like it's nothing compared to what people actually say And so that's what matters most is like video screen share Voice from the participants from AI. Yeah, like so we use voice a lot So there's a voice-to-voice mode where there's like no buttons It's just conversation and like people like it but like not as as much. And I think there's still just, if it's not a person, then it's still got this,

the minor imperfections, the kind of slight bits of latency. And so I do think in two years, we'll talk more about that. But ultimately, like people know it's a computer, like they know it's AI and like, they're kind of cool about it. Like we've done a bunch of research where like, do you care that it's AI? Like, no, like I get it. Yeah. Right. In fact, they like do you care that it's AI like no like I get it Yeah, right. In fact, they like have even expressed that like they'll share more because there isn't a person sure It's an idea of like social desirability bias. You're like, I don't want to come off as a person that is X Y and Z

I will just tell you look I want this to be faster. I want like better Or like the real reason I'm not using your product is this. I'm not going to say that to a PM or a researcher who's like at the company. Right, but instead you'll tell the real truth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that was like our initial pilot with Weight Watchers was all about weight loss. And like that was like a thing people don't want

to share a lot about. But with AI, they like shared everything about their lifestyle. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like you've done like, you've worked with really big companies and that's where the money is. But when you went through YC or if you're here, you know, there's a big theme of talk to your customers. Has there been any pull at the lower end of the market?

Yeah, it's funny, sometimes you get a founder reaching out, like, I really want to use this because I don't want to talk to my customers. Yeah. I'm like, I'm just like, don't be like, talk to your customers. We don't want you as a customer if you don't want to. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

There's basically, I think a good reason not to use an AI moderator is like, if you could sell to that person, probably don't ask for that. Maybe to build the relationship yourself. The truth is, especially with all the B2B stuff, there's not as much. You can usually turn around and say, come back when you're a couple hundred people, you're kind of scaling that out. But yeah, with some consumer stuff, where you really have millions of people you're trying to learn from, it can make a ton of sense.

Talk to me about the data processing and the intelligibility that goes into once you have all that data. It's very nice to be like, hey, we have like, you know, 5,000 hours of video. Yeah, we repaired a 200 page report for you. Yeah, but nobody reads that. How are you thinking about actually compressing it down,

because that seems uniquely suitable for AI. But there's still a lot of art in terms of like, a lot of people say, oh yeah, I did a deep research report. And then I, the next query was, give me 10 bullet points about that. Because I didn't actually want the full report. Yeah, yeah. So, all right. So our vision here is like, we should be building, we are building the like deep research, but for primary research.

So you think about deep research and you're like, all right, all desk research is now commoditized. So what if you just ask a question, you just want to learn from real people that's much more up to date, your own proprietary data, it should be the same kind of idea, right? End to end agents are doing that.

But today, the premise of AI scaling your qualitative research is that you also have to help them do something with all that conversational data, right? Because otherwise you're like left with just like hours and hours of transcripts. I'm like, I'm not gonna review that. Yeah. The application of this is I know this is not what you're focusing on, but if I was a VC that wanted to write a multi hundred million dollar growth check, being able to like get live interviews with like 500 customers,

I mean, people are going to do this GLG and yeah, that's right No, this is a huge opportunity actually. So yeah Yeah, I have a whole side thought like I think one of the challenges there is with the expert networks It's all about finding the right people Yeah, but if you're in a situation where you can find the right people and you can find a hundred of the right people Well, we just had play-doh AI on you because you should talk to them. They're in this batch They do like LLM based people search so you can find like every person that at data bricks that was a former founder No, there's an opportunity to connect all of that through that

but what I was gonna say with the synthesis is what we do is basically taking all the video stuff and then we like Process it and we give you basically reports But it's like not just a like here's what it's telling you like deep research style. But what you could do is like start like just a like here's what it's telling you like deep research style but what you could do is like start like slicing and dicing it you could like we quantify it we give you breakdowns we like build highlight reels for you and then like people can like cut it and segment it and so it's like a whole analytics suite yeah on top of qualitative data which like not a thing that has ever been done yeah because what were you doing what were you doing before this

so before this I was a VP of product at triple bite if you know Yeah, harsh hired me. Yeah Exactly. He yeah. Yeah. He anyway, so I worked a triple bite at jumpstart another company So I was like leading product and design teams, but earlier in my career I was like a as a consultant where I was doing like this work non-stop where I was like Are you a are you a nominative determinism guy? like this work nonstop. Where I was like, I was- Are you a nominative determinism guy? Yeah, yeah, he's looking for the capital cannon

to fire a billion dollars into research. I have not capitalized on that. I was looking at that too. We're big, we're big. We're big into the names or the truth. The names are the truth. Okay, I like that, I like that. Yeah, it works well for you.

I have a friend who always calls me the loose cannon. Yeah, oh that's crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's like, you can never know what to expect, you know? You know the loose cannon, that's a little bit too much. Dial it in the capital cannon. That's like you can never know what to expect. You know, it's a little bit too much. Dial it in the capital. Can you trust it with your capital? Just give it to him.

Yeah, I'm going to pivot off of loose cannon. I'll have a capital. Yeah, Aaron, capital cannon. There you go. Anyway, this is fantastic. Thanks for watching. Congratulations. I'll have you back on.

Yeah, 17 million dollar series. Let's go. Fantastic. Congratulations. We'll have you back on sometime. Yeah, I'm sure. $17 million series. Let's go. Fantastic. Biggest round we've heard yet. Let's bring in the next guest. Operative. There we go.

And the shanties are going on. The pit vipers are going on. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? Hey, how's it going? Good to meet you. I'm John. Eric, nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you guys. Good to meet you. I'm John. Eric, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you guys. Good to meet you. You're gonna wanna keep those mics close to you because it is noisy here at YCDemo Day 2025. Good to meet you. Can you introduce yourself and the company that you're building? Yeah, we're Operative. I'm Chris, I'm Chris Settles. This is my co-founder, Eric Quintanilla.

You can introduce yourself as well. But we're friends from high school. We met at West Aurora High School in Aurora, Illinois in 2014. We were doing our first Java programming class together and ten years later here we are. Deep, deep. What did you guys do between then and now? Yeah, do you want to tell more of the programming languages? Do you want to tell more of the story? Yeah. I mean, we went to college, you still write Java. I don't know. Yeah. We went to college, uh, worked at a couple of big tech companies, work on a couple of startups.

Yeah. Chris was at Uber. You can talk about that. There we go. Nice. Did you wear the pit vipers during your, your main pitch? Sorry? Oh, you're asking me where the sun is? Did you wear them while you were pitching the, the phone? No? Oh, you're asking me where the sun's sun shades were?

Did you wear them while you were pitching the fall? Oh, no. I just got these from Marco. I don't know. We saw Marco in here wearing these. We're like, Marco, you look so cool. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So break down the company. Yeah, what are you guys doing? All right. So we're working on web app code generation for internal APIs. So you can imagine having a lovable plus a retool for your company, where you can on demand just a lovable plus a retool for your

company where you can on demand just create any kind of application that you're thinking about whether it's like a new dashboard or it's some kind of like app to manage your airflow and you want to have a nice UI with it and you want to connect it to all these different pipelines. I mean that's just one use case you can think about but you can build any kind of front-end application that connects to existing APIs that you have in your company. Yeah, I remember when you set up a Django website, you kind of get the Django admin out of the box,

and you can just investigate all the different classes that you've kind of defined in the database. What are some examples you could give us of these internal APIs that typically float around in companies? Or you can either give like a precise example or just a general example. Yeah, you want to give one? Yeah I mean a lot of the use cases are centered around like customer service Okay, like want to interact with like a database sure we're doing support wanna Want to like it change like payments and stuff like that data visualization stuff like that. Okay, so

yeah, I mean, is it unique about bringing different services together? Because a lot of smaller companies would say, you want to look at the payments admin? Head over to your Stripe dashboard, because Stripe's already built that. Where are companies currently falling short? Is it that they're not bringing the data together

across services, or is it that they're developing their own databases and their own tables that just don't have an API out of the box or don't have a web app in front of their API out of the box? Yeah, yeah, so as, so definitely startups are super easy to just say, okay, yeah, check out the Stripe dashboard and manage that. And then that's what Stripe does.

That's a typical customer service flow. It's like, you go to Shopify for this, and then you go to the CMS for this, then you go to Stripe does. That's a typical customer service plan. It's like, you go to Shopify for this, then you go to the CMS for this, then you go to Stripe if there's a problem over there, and then you go to payroll. It's all SaaS products. Yeah, but one of the things we notice, especially at our jobs in Big Tech,

is that eventually your product gets really complicated and you actually don't, there's not a SaaS product that those services offer, and so you end up needing to build something on top of it in order to manage it. And then you end up needing to build all these different internal tools to have all of that organized in a nice way where you can connect it all

together, because the traditional SaaS doesn't support the features that you're looking for. And so then as a result, you hire a team to build out those kinds of applications and then spend a lot of money. And that's what we're trying to bridge that. What was the aha moment for you guys? Were you seeing the kind of explosion of tools like lovable and things like that and then you saw wait why aren't people doing this

internally or what was the kind of moment that you guys decided to focus on this? Yeah I mean I think for us we saw like we launched this like lovable type product and we saw a lot of people from companies using it. As a consumer product, actually, at first. Yeah, to build internal tools for their company. So we actually, we were like, oh, we should just bring this directly B2B. Cool.

Yeah, in some ways, it makes sense being able to quickly generate something, test it, and then it's very different than these ephemeral products that exist and ultimately will need to be, I don't know, sometimes completely rebuilt. Yeah, talk about the go-to-market motion. It sounds like this is not a company where you need to sell to every other startup in YC.

Who are you selling to? How are you actually convincing them to take the leap and go with you? Yeah, so we're starting, from the initial traction we saw with the consumer product. We decided we want to work on this enterprise direction and or like larger organization direction because of these like use cases we

saw with people signing up from all of their work emails and building apps. So we're starting some design partnerships with large organizations. I can't say, I won't say the exact name. And we're planning to kind of just leverage our warm intro outbound network, our warm intro network, to be able to talk to some more organizations.

And I think there's some, there's actually a large percentage of companies that even will try to use Retool to build internal apps. And so we think we can work with some of the other YC companies that are doing things like that using that and but maybe have Are you guys are you guys working with retool or you you can kind of like kind of competing Yeah, we have a pretty cool direction that's like pretty unique at the moment So we're talking about the actual instantiation of the web app. I'm sure you're using AI and co-generation. What's working?

What? How much is are you leveraging? Oh three or Claude or open source or Gemini? What's what what are you looking for? Where are the models falling short? Yeah, where are you kind of like trying to stay ahead of the puck because everything's developing so quickly? You want to take it? Yeah, so I think on the platform, I think the foundation models provide a nice foundation.

But we try to leverage good tools. So viewing a file tree, we had a browser agent on top to test and validate the app. The models fall short in, I think they're good at going zero to one, but I think if you go zero to one and then there's a bug, going back and finding what file it is, what's implicated in it,

I think it's very hard for the models and it's better to just start over. Yeah, have you benchmarked against how long it takes someone to build a web app for on top of a private API using cursor and just saying I'm gonna vibe code this myself versus your product. Because it feels like it's getting faster and faster

and there's a lot of, I mean there's like, there's whole open source projects for like, build out the API docs around an API just from, you know, this was programmatic, this wasn't even AI. You know, you just have like, oh you wanna put this, you wanna instantiate this is a blog? OK, here you go. What are you benchmarking against?

Actually, maybe a cool story on the back story of how we came across this is that we actually started with people wanting to develop apps inside Cursor. And so one of the unique insights we had is that today, developing any kind of front end requires that you ask Cursor for a prompt and then you open up the web page and go click on it and just verify that it looks how you want it to. You can go and then tell Cursor, okay I want to move the blue button inside the black box. You have to just keep prompting it until it

does that. So actually one thing Eric and I worked on, the first thing Eric and I worked on was actually an MCP tool that allows people to, like opens up a browser agent that can go and view changes that a coding agent makes. And it will just test to see if the, like visually, if the app actually works. Actually, there's one of our users over there. Oh, there's one?

He's actually just giving us feedback on that. So we grew that to like 1,000 GitHub stars. And so people got really excited about that. But we wanted to bring those same tools into a product like Lovable or like CodeGen and be able to have all of this code generation with testing built in so that way we can allow users to just go from prompt to a working web page without any interaction.

Very cool. Are you guys still raising? Raising right now? We're still raising. We have, we've been backed by Weekend Fund. Oh, cool. Nice. And also a few other angel investors. And we are, we're still raising and open to chatting

with other investors. One of the early investors in Retool actually. Oh yeah. They have an angel investor in Retool investing in us. Okay, cool. So. Play the hits. Play the hits.

Play the hits. Find something you love and just keep Do you have any metrics that you shared here at demo day? Yeah, as I mentioned we had the GitHub repo we like scaled to a hundred or sorry a thousand stars. We just launched the consumer product we had it got around 2,500 different users using operative to build apps Yeah that's great. And right now there's about a 4% conversion from free to pro plan.

We have a pretty generous free tier, so you can go and use the app however much you want. But for the power users, there's around 4% of them converting. So we have about 1.5K monthly revenue at the moment. Amazing. And that's with the consumer product, but we're planning to scale more revenue, of course. Yeah, I think the enterprise, you can probably get that on your first contract.

Exactly. Thank you for stopping by. Please give us your hats. Thank you so much. Have fun out there. It's great having you on. Awesome. We'll talk to you soon.

All right. Let's bring in the next crew. We are at YC Demo Day. Hey, how you doing, man? What up? What up? It's time to talk sleep scores. Let's talk sleep scores.

I didn't sleep last night. It was brutal. I was at the Rosewood. The Rosewood doesn't have eight sleep. That's a big problem. Not yet. Not yet. 90% of the guests are. Good to see you. I want to talk F1. I want to talk F1. You just did an interview with

Charles Leclerc. Break it down. What did you learn from him? His obsession for every single detail in his preparation. He goes for two weeks at the mountain in January to prepare for the season. Is that for elevation or? Elevation. And then he does every sort of skiing

for like eight hours a day. And then he goes to the gym and then he brings the pod, he sleeps on the pod while he's there. That is when he really prepares the season. And then his obsession for every single detail when he travels, all the gadgets that he brings with himself from devices for recovery, ice bath, obviously the pod. Yeah, the neck training. Is he doing the leg compression thing? That's a big one right now. And I don't know if you saw it.

So Charles was talking to us about the fact that when he's on the grid, it's really hot. And a lot of athletes in Formula One now, they use these vests, the cooling vests. Oh, interesting. But they don't really work. And so the way you want to really cool your body, you need to cool the palm of your hands.

Oh, interesting. And so I was with my co-founder Max, and we said, what if we build cooling gloves for you? He said, oh, that would be interesting. So we built the gloves in three days. No way. No way. And then one of our people, they flew to meet him in Barca.

In Barca, they were like 35 degrees Celsius. It was super hot. And so Charles started using these gloves, cooling gloves that we built for him. And then as he goes in the box, Ferrari takes a picture of him just for Scuderia Ferrari, blah, blah. And so he was on the cover of the Instagram account. With the Instagram account. With the HZ.

Let's go. So it was free branding for us with the device we built for him. That's great. And so now. You see that with the tires, they have the tire warmers, then you have the hand coolers. Every different part of the F1 machine

needs to be temperature controlled. It's the perfect sponsorship for you. But then I saw him using this. So padel players, tennis players, they all say, oh, can I use it? Man we did we didn't. And so now we have a team that is building this cooling globe for a few athletes. That's incredible. What has YC Demo Day been like for you? Are you here just trying to sell eight sleeps or are you also doing some

investing? What are you getting out of YC Demo Day today? Yeah, I do a bunch of investing. I invested like probably 20 companies in this batch. Already? Wow. Amazing. You gotta get it in here. You need to start early or then you're out.

Oh yeah, you gotta get it early. And so in every batch I try to invest in around 20% of the batch. Oh cool. More or less. That's great. And I have been doing this for two years. Have you seen anyone doing cool hardware, cool consumer devices?

I know that there's a ton of AI, there's some hard tech, defense tech's becoming cool, but I always like, I like the 8 Sleep because it's a gadget. You can give it to someone for Christmas and they experience it every day in a very different way than just nap on their phone. Have you seen anything? I'll answer your question, but it's cool because I work around with my head and people stop me and they say, oh, I sleep on your product. I just met two founders and one had a 75 score, the other one a 48 score.

Oh no, 48 the night before. That doesn't work. I've been smoking Jordy this week. 48. Oh, no. That's the 48th and 90th. We're never finished. We're never finished. That doesn't work. I've been smoking Jordy this week. I beat him twice in a row. I got it. I love in the 90s.

I'm doing great. I've had a rough one. But there is not a lot of consumer hardware. It's hard. It's so hard. Yeah, it's really hard. I was just talking to a few founders. Even when I look back, other companies starting with us,

they all struggle. So we have been so lucky to be here today. But you see a lot of really cool stuff now in robotics. Yep, you have Matic robots. We've had those. We've had them in the office and at home. And so usually there is an hardware section, and that is the first section where I go.

So heart tech or hardware, that is my passion. And then AI is everywhere. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you see a lot at CES. You'll see the AI-connected oven and the AI connected toaster. And YC's kind of stayed away from that because it feels like it's hard to build like an independent business around. But I am optimistic that once the software side of AI is so commoditized and so just

ubiquitous, we'll see another revolution in hardware, another turn. And I think with the robots, things will get easier because the robots will explode and a lot of consumer will buy different shapes of robots. Yeah, this is what Nat Frieden was talking about. He wants the robot that picks up the leaves one by one instead of leaf blowers. And it's like a funny idea, but it feels like,

yeah, it's only a couple years away and then it'll just be a company. Even for security, I have this idea about a robot that goes around your house for security. Yeah, so you put cameras everywhere. With cameras and lights. I would immediately buy that if it could go around my house and make sure that... Especially if you could put a gun on it.

I mean Amazon did launch a drone that will... Or maybe they just launched a video about this. There's a drone that takes off from a base station where it charges and it can fly around your house and kind of patrol inside your house. But yeah, external. When the fires were happening, I figured out that a lot of fires in LA are just started from a single ember landing in like a backyard or on a house or get stuck. And you just realize that there's probably an opportunity for drone based.

Yeah. There's actually a couple of companies that did like water turrets that you mount to your roof. And then if they see fire they can just spray it right there. It's a hose. It's literally just a hose on an articulated arm. It's like not that complicated but you could. What about it, 8? Any other hardware coming down the line that you can talk you can kind of allude to? So actually we have an office in SF. So I just landed. I came here and I'll be here for a couple of hours. Then I go to the office to see the new products.

Very cool. I'm already sleeping on the next generation. Oh, there you go. I'm sleeping on the future products. That's such an edge. That's such an edge. You're on pod 5, I'm already on pod 6. All my friends, they always make jokes because I always sleep on the next generation and

there are new devices. So they buy the latest, but I'm already one generation ahead. That's your edge. This is how you win. This is how you win. We started working with some new sensors that are incredible in terms of computer vision. So we really want to double down on body scanning and scan your body while you're asleep to save your life.

And that to me is one of the most exciting things, because if you can convert your bed in a health platform and save your life, that's pretty sick. Yeah, that's amazing. What are the companies that you're most excited about in the batch, without picking too many favorites out of the 20, anything that you're most excited about? At the end of the day, I just get excited with founders. I mean, I just met this guy, and he's a high school dropout. He's

18. And he said, what? Yeah, because I was at school and decided to drop out. I thought there was this opportunity for reality to help teachers. And so I dropped out. I built it and now I'm selling it to my teachers. I said, what? That's amazing. So when you see these people, right, I don't even, I don't care what happens with your company, but I admire you so much. Can I, can I, can I? Of course, because I want to back up the founder. Exactly. And so that is what excites me, like to stay young.

Yeah. And see these generations shaping the future. That's fantastic. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. We will see you soon. Great job guys. Thank you.

Yeah, yeah, glad you did. It's been great. Let's bring in the next team Welcome to the YC demo day 2035 stream. I put so much of the Okay, I'm working through it. How you guys doing? Oh, you guys already got the hats on We'll see if there's if there's other surprises in store. We might need to blow the whistle Welcome to the stream. How you doing? I like how you guys just said made in SF, not made with love, made with Made in SF.

Made in SF. Making shots. We have a made in with love in San Francisco as well. Oh you do? Okay. Well, what is Throxy? Break it down for us. Explain the business.

We're building AI agents that help people selling into traditional industries such as manufacturing, distribution. There are sectors in which selling is very hard, especially from a B2B perspective. So we're helping those companies prospect into legacy industries and we manage the entire outreach to those. Whenever someone's interested in speaking with my clients, I connect them with their buyers to help them grow. So that's like selling super technical products.

What does that look like? Yeah, it's selling super technical products, but also professional services such as consulting. The important thing is we help people selling into traditional spaces like manufacturing. Okay, so there's a manufacturing company out there, they're making microphones for example, I am a company that's going to sell you know better software design software that runs on this or automates the facility, you're gonna help me find clients to sell to. Is this more about the

prospecting and developing a lead list, doing the actual outreach? Is this an AI business development representative SDR play? Are we gonna see a billboard on the 101 for you pretty soon? What's going on? So it's a bit of like everything you've mentioned. So like, we don't like to micro ourselves as AISDRs because they have like a bad reputation. They have a terrible reputation.

And we think like focus is a multiplier on like the work we do. And that's why we're like serving these traditional industries, which are like traditionally like underserved. Everyone's ignoring them, but they're like huge market opportunity and like really high average contract values. So we can like have people serving these industries,

both with AI, but with a bit of human in the loop right now. And now we're automating those humans in the loop as models get better, as agents improve, and rolling them out. So talk about the copilot era. Where is it important for, in the sales process, to keep the human in the loop right now? What is the most automatable part of that process?

So the most automatable part is qualifying the whole companies. So like okay actually like we just like pull a list of companies from like our crawlers and then we look for like specific stuff with AI agents and we just qualify them. Could they even be a buyer? Do they have budget? Are they big enough? Are they declining in sales? Are they about to get rolled up into some private equity thing? The thing is like because we're focusing only in manufacturing companies,

we can check for very specific stuff. Okay. Does this machine like fit any specific specifications? Do they have like this grind type? Do they do like CNC milling? Yeah. That kind of stuff, which is really important where like horizontal AISDRs fail.

Sure. And they fail to serve them because they're too generic. Because if I'm selling CNC software and some manufacturer doesn't use CNCs, why should I even talk to them? So you're saving me time that way. How did you guys get into this? So I think I was in sales,

I was doing a lot of manual work myself. I've been in SDR three companies, completely different value propositions, but I think one of the big issues was actually finding the company I can sell to. I was doing all of that very manual research. Do they have buying power? Do they have this specific certification?

When I was selling into hospitals, I had to check what their team staff looked like to see where they fit my software. And I hated my life. I was like. You were still performing, right? You were putting up big numbers. Yeah, I actually was.

And I generally felt like my job was going to be replaced soon. So I was like, let me get ahead of this. Let me replace myself. Talk to me about what it takes to actually qualify a lead. What are the data sources? I've heard LinkedIn's extremely rich, but it's very locked down, and they don't let you play with the API anymore.

Obviously you can crawl around on Google search, and some companies have a lot of information on their websites. Some of these manufacturers barely even have websites at all. How are you getting data? That's our insight. Our insight is like LinkedIn doesn't serve these manufacturing people, because the owner

of a manufacturing company is not on LinkedIn. Their prospects are not there. So we've built our own crawlers, which are crawling the whole Google Knowledge Graph from scratch and then sending agents to qualify these people, which have access to specific tools with directories of other manufacturing companies or API access to machine specification, access to vision so we can like check out the content of the website, like take a screenshot. Oh, interesting, take a screenshot.

Hey, that's a CNC. Exactly. This is a CNC company. Talk about traction. Did you guys come into YC with this idea and you've just been working on it or did you iterate towards it? Yeah, we came in with this idea.

In six months, we've gone to 1.5 million in a year. Let's go. That might be the biggest one we've heard yet. That might be one of the big ones. Let's go. Woo! 1.5 million baby, let's go. Congratulations.

That's sick. That's amazing. So the round's already closed, I imagine. Yeah. We gotta do another round. Absolute dogs, absolute dogs. That's great, that's great. That's fantastic. That's fantastic.

And what's your guys' backstory? How'd you get to YC? We met in high school and we've always been building stuff since we were kids. Awesome. I love it. Paolo was like, I hate sales, but I love money. Let's go. Let's go build a company together.

I was working in AI at JP Morgan. It was the most boring thing to do ever. Working for the money. So I was like, let's go do it. For the money. That's amazing. That's amazing. How big is the team?

I mean, it sounds like you've already scaled this business a little bit. Yeah. So we're a team of four right now. Okay. Focus is very important. Yeah. So when you're asking where does humans perform better than AI, that's what we're testing. Sure. you're asking where does humans perform better than AI? That's what we're testing.

Whenever AI does better, we're automated, but if not, we have us actually doing that work. We wanna be very thick into the workflow, understand the problem, and at the end of the day, it's my reputation down the line. It's not the AI STO of Throxy, it's me. So we're showing face in front of our clients and ensuring that this works.

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Well, good luck to you. Amazing, guys. Congratulations. Awesome, guys. Thanks for popping on. Cheers. Nice meeting you.

We will talk to you soon. And we will continue our coverage of YC Demo Day 2025. We will bring in the next guest. I see some people out there. Come on down to the Palace of Party Rounds. Tell us about your company. How you doing? Morphix in the studio. I see some people out there. Come on down to the Palace of Party Rounds. Tell us about your company. How you doing? Morphix in the studio.

I see one hat. I think I gotta give out a second hat. How you doing? Welcome to the stream. Good catch. Come on down, good catch. Who are you? What do you do?

We are Morphic. I'm Avi and we build open source multimodal search for AI agents and applications. Okay. Open source multimodal search for AI agents and applications. Okay, open source multimodal search. What are, give me some examples of the multimodality. What are we searching because some of these data sets that I'm imagining if you're trying to search over YouTube videos, YouTube is gonna shut you down

if I'm trying to search across that. No, that's a great question. So for multimodality, it includes not only like just plain textual documents, but documents that might have pictures, photos, images embedded inside of them. What a lot of other people approach it as is trying to do OCR parsing on top, but that doesn't work because documents are. Yeah. PDFs are a nightmare. The PDF spec is a disaster. We know this.

We've known this for decades. It's not getting any better. Adobe. What we do is we embed pages directly as images and retrieve over those. That is much higher accuracy, much, much better performance. Yep, very cool. Are you guys going to be able to fix the photos app? Searching photos, very hard. We'd love to if Apple gives us a chance.

Give them a shot. Give them a shot, Tim. It does seem like they're trying to do that type of multimodal search on a cross of it, but they're just not there yet in terms of like, I'll be searching for a dog jumping on a couch. I know that I have it in my camera roll, but it's a video. And that scene happened later

and they haven't indexed it properly. So lots of opportunities. Talk about where people are implementing this. Is it enterprise private data sets? Is it public scrape the web? I want to search everything, narrow it down for me. It's a little bit of both. The most adoption is in the legal tech space.

Oh, interesting. Also in the health tech space, they have lots of documents with tables, charts. Patent drafting, for example, has a lot of technical diagrams in there. Yeah, of course. And it works really well for those people as well. Okay, talk to me about the other major players in the space.

We saw Glean yesterday raised what 150 million at 7.2 billion. This feels somewhat adjacent. You're kind of eating off their plate a little bit. Is that a direct competitor or is there something different where you can play nicely with them? Yeah. So I mean, the kind of benefit for us is that we provide APIs and much more of a developer tool. And the way we see this going is actually not as a competitive, but more of a provider to Glean. And not just Glean, but to people that are building Cursor for X

and you need to deal with multimodal documents. eight, right? One of the things that cursor the reason why like tools like cursor and like coding agents have become really good is because code is low entropy, which means you can predict like well into the future what code is going to look like. One thing that we can do is help you get that low entropy with multimodal information. And so like what video editing looks like kind of like three or four steps in the future, if I've like cut a clip and like cut another clip, I kind of know that I'm going to delete the thing in the middle right and so if you can use that and essentially provide that to models as like code that ends up like performing a lot better and you can start building cursor for video editing and you can start building.

How did you guys meet what were you doing before YC? We're both brothers. Oh, no way. Yeah before I see I was a software engineer at MongoDB Oh cool, and this guy open source thing tracks dropped out of where? Colonel nice Yeah, talk to about talk to us about the open source strategy. How closely are you mimicking MongoDB? We heard early on the show that MongoDB didn't have a managed service, a SaaS product until they almost went IPO. Are you planning to monetize the open source program earlier? What is the play between am I using the open source version or am I paying you look like?

Yeah, good question. The way we see it is for people who, if it benefits a single community member, then we want to open source it. If it benefits a team, then we want to leave it closed source. Interesting. So things like SSO, things like connectors, like Google Drive, et cetera, or maybe like speeding it up for sure, like making queries much faster.

This is all going to fall apart when people start building one person billion dollar companies because you're going to be like, it's all has to be open source because you only have one person. That's true. That would be a good problem. That's a good problem to have. But digging in more into the open source, what's the traction been like?

Do you have a GitHub project that has a lot of stars? What are you tracking in terms of rollout? 2,600 stars today. Congratulations. That's fantastic. 4,000 monthly downloads. Amazing. Thank you, Jordan.

200 active deployments in production. Fantastic. There we go. There we go. Audience is probably mad at me in the chat for that one, but it's amazing. Yeah, yeah, it's fantastic. You guys came into YC with this specific idea,

or did you iterate to it throughout? We came in with a much broader idea. We weren't too focused or indexed on multimodal before. We were like, hey, just we want to be the data layer. What sort of helped us was trying to narrow down on the multimodal aspect, seeing how people are building more and just building on from there. Did you always want to start a company together? Yes.

That's been a dream since we were kids. Incredible. Incredible. How's fundraising going? Fundraising's going well. We're kind of close, but yeah, looking to do it faster. Well, congratulations. It's been great chatting with you.

Good luck on the next stage of your journey. Very exciting. We'll be following along. We're excited to use Cursor for video. Whenever that would be built, send them our way. Yeah, they'll probably build it on top of your company so thank you so much for stopping by do we have anyone else a little bit of lunch break going on giving you some inside baseball here why coming in oh day 2025 but we have one

more team they don't need to take lunch breaks. They're owning purple. They're working too hard. They're owning purple. They're verticalizing purple. And more pit vipers. The pit vipers have made a return. I think it's all one pair of pit vipers in peace. Recycling. We know the pit viper founder. There's not enough color going on here. Let's put on some yellow hats as well. Let's just really get crazy with the fever dream that's going on with the orange, the purple, the yellow. Clidy, Clidy, Clidy. right, what are you guys up to? What are you guys building?

We're building automatic technical documentation for code base. Okay. So saving 30% of employee time. Okay. Yeah. Explain the first customer, are you going after larger enterprises,

are you selling to other YC companies? Yeah, ideally two enterprises. Okay. But we're starting off with series AB onwards companies. Okay. Majorly because that's when you start onboarding people. Yep. You need internal documentation to actually give Yeah, ideally to enterprises. any sort of like right now it's a web application, but any sort of application in theory. So like API is part of it.

Yeah, there's a number of open source projects that kind of allow you to stand up a boiler plate for open source documentation or API documentation. How is your product different? What are you hydrating? Because at a certain point, if there's kind of internal sacred knowledge around how an endpoint works,

you have to get that from the person that designed it, or can you instantiate everything from the code? Yeah, that's the plan. Like the idea is for us to not depend on one person. The idea is like, we actually go across the organization, all the code bases, and understand those technical specifications in the background.

So there's no dependency. How are you dealing with security? I imagine that if you're going across all the code bases, all of a sudden there's like secrets that could leak, there's internal tooling that maybe they don't want to have out there in their documentation. How do you think about that? So we make it completely self-hostable.

Okay. So especially for an enterprise, when they have to be compliant, and regulations and so on. So we completely make it self-hostable. People can actually just use our product, like it's packaged, so you can spin it up put the repositories in and nothing leaves their network how did you guys get to YC?

Like in terms of the place? Yeah what's the backstory? Car, plane, what was it? I mean through plane that was the last time. I've known this guy we've been through so many places I've known him for about 10 years we met in uni, hackathons, tons of projects. Very cool. And to get to YC, just a couple of failed applications and here we are now.

There you go. There's a story. Always a showdown. So many, everyone has one at least. How's the traction been? What are you sharing today? Yeah, so we launched about two and a half weeks ago. We already are around 3,000 in revenue.

Congratulations. There we go. We have about six, six, seven customers now. Oh, so we are. Yeah, it's going well. We have increasing 30 over 30% week on week. There we go. We got to wait for the next like a thousand weeks. Hopefully.

Yeah. We need to raise again. Nice. How's fundraising going? You guys in the midst of it? Yeah, we are about 40% there, 40, 50% there. So we're getting close, hopefully. Yeah, what is just you on the team right now?

Do you have anyone else? Just two of us. Okay. Keep it that way for a while, or you think you'll start really scaling up? We are thinking of getting people on board, but yeah, we want to keep it lean. We're trying to automate documentation, so. Yeah, you got all that. You got to automate, right? Yeah, yeah, we want to make it, we want to keep it lean. Return automated documentation.

So you got automated, right? Yeah, you got to live it. That's great. Well, thank you so much for coming on the stream. It's been a great time. Congratulations, guys. Thank you so much. Awesome day.

We'll talk to you soon. Bye. And we are ready for our next guests coming into the Palace of Party Rounds. Welcome to the stream. The hum of YCD Demo Day has died down as people move across the street to lunch. Good to meet you, how you doing?

Nice to meet you, I'm Jon. Pleasure, nice to meet you, how you doing? What's happening, what's happening? Big day. Keeping up, yeah, it's a big day for us. Yeah. How'd the pitch go? Smooth?

We're gonna be in the afternoon. Okay, in the afternoon. How are the nerves?. Yeah. How did the pitch go? Smooth? We're going to be in the afternoon. OK, in the afternoon. How are the nerves? How are the nerves? Honestly, we are used. Yeah. By too long, we are used. Alumni, do you have a day?

They do a good job of kind of getting you so many reps that it just feels like anything else. Yeah, honestly. They work you up to it very easily. Introduce the company. What are you guys building? So I'm Francesco, the founder of QA. Alessandro is the CEO.

So we are building computer user AI agents. Meaning AI agents that can solve any problems like a human would do in the terms of clicking, typing, scrolling. Okay. At what layer of the AI stack are you working at? Are you sitting on top of just like a Chromium instance? Or are you actually sitting on top of something like a browser base or do you can? We wrap an entire operating system

Isolated environment kind of like a docker for yeah Okay, and that means that we can use system level events for interacting these commands like click type and really any PowerShell, yeah, and then and then what's working in computer use right now? really any best short PowerShell commands. Yeah, and then what's working in computer reuse right now? There's a theory that you just read the HTML at some point. Now there's more multimodal image generation, like actually take a screenshot, process that, understand where to click, what's working?

Yeah, so screenshot is working way better than accessibility tree for operating system. In general, you don't have any HTML DOM to parse really. You don't parse any of that. You just throw it all out. We just like use screenshot mode. Screenshot and piece of base model for that. And it's also being proven by research

that's working way better than interactive DOM. What categories of agents are you guys seeing the most, having the most excitement around traction? I think anytime you're building agentic infrastructure, you gotta have companies that are building great products on top of you. That can be a challenge, but I'm sure there's a lot of other companies in the batch.

Yeah, yeah, so we haven't chased any verticals, meaning that- You haven't chased any verticals yet? Any verticals, meaning that we really like the infrastructure. Just build the tool, figure out what people want. Yeah, exactly. Because actually, first month in YC,

we were getting the most esoteric ask from the users in terms of, hey, I have this bunch of contractors. They're simply trimming videos on video editing software on Mac OS. Can I use Kua for that? Sure. And really, we couldn't converge to very common workflows. And that's why companies, our customers,

are chasing those verticals for us. OK. Do you see the market fragmenting? That's why companies, our customers, are chasing those verticals for us. Okay. Do you see the market fragmenting? Do you think you will find a vertical and niche down, or do you want it all? Honestly, we want it all. Okay.

That's good. And we are here to do it. Then what is the, what are the key deliverables that you have to optimize against? Is it speed, reliability, price, some sort of combination? How do you think about that? Like probably for computer user agents,

we are still like six months away from the Chaggbt moment, maybe for browser user agent, that's still the moment is today. So once we get that level of intelligence for models, we need to come prepared with a very good infrastructure to scale this isolated environment because like our leap of faith is that five years from now most of the AI agent in multi-agent system we rely on API maybe 80% of the scenarios and the other 20% are gonna be based on browser and computer tools. What were you guys doing before this? I was working on

Microsoft for over five years. Oh cool. Awesome. Myself I was a notion and I built also a few startups in the past. Nice. Are you guys Italian? Yeah. When did you come to the US? Three months ago now. Three months ago. 4YC. Yeah. Crazy. Has it been living up to expectations? Yeah, definitely. People ask me. Ferrari or Lamborghini. Yeah. People ask me, how is San Francisco now? Is it better? And I don't have any comparison.

How old were you when you knew you wanted to do YC? I think it was pretty recently, like three years ago now. Okay. Yeah, for me, maybe since I was 16 and I'm 26 now so it's been like a long dream for me and it's still like I don't know if it's reality or not but yeah. Living the dream. What's the go-to-market been like? So the go-to-market right now we've been focusing mostly on startup and scale up because we wanted to prove that we were on the right path and eventually fail also faster. But we have an open source framework

over 8k stars. Whoa! 8k stars! Oh, you hit that! You buried the lead on us! Buried the lead! Please go and start over. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Head over to GitHub right now, give it another star. Yeah, try Kuwa. Head over to GitHub right now. Give it another star. Yeah, try Kuwa. That's amazing.

Slash Kuwa. Slash Kuwa. So yeah, what's the monetization strategy around that Open Source project? So we, like for Smoking YC, we were all these customer inbound that were basically asking us, how do I even productionize on a computer user agent today? So we are providing a pathway for the user

from the open source to bring in the same workflow that are working locally for them and scale them on cloud. So we're really charging only based on compute today. You simply have to input an API key on our platform about what's going to happen also for us. Are we going to become a LME inference provider for these computer user AI models?

Because maybe the public sense is that there are only two computer user AI models, maybe maybe the public sense is that there are only two computer user AI models, maybe the one from OpenAI and Anthropic, and that's only because they have a better PR office than other models. But honestly, even on HackingFace, you'll find model from Bydance, UiDarts 1.5, that's also out-beating OpenAI and Anthropic.

On computer-reuse benchmarks? On computer benchmarks, like OS Word. Sure. And they are so hard to set up and also hard to discover. And also we're going to be the go-to catalog and platformware. Yeah, how good are the evals right now? Are the benchmarks for computer use? It feels more abstract than just, you know, do some math problems.

Yeah, so I was actually working with the Windows team when I was at Microsoft doing evals for computer AI agents on a benchmark called Windows Agent Arena, which is derived from OS word. Really like this benchmark. They like tasks are not very meaningful like for instance, you will find tasks like, hey, can you go and open VLC and add subtitles? Who's using VLC? So that's the question. Even like using LibreOffice instead of like Office or even Google Docs. So what's gonna happen, my leap of faith here

is that the next generational benchmark will measure like real-world tasks. Yeah, do you think there'll be a sort of like L.M. Arena style benchmark where a human is watching two computer use models use computers and there's kind of like a vibe check almost. Yeah, or even like a WikiRace where you have like... A WikiRace. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Even like you have... Okay, so WikiRace is like, you know, you start with Y Combinator and you have to end at Christopher Columbus. And how many clicks do you have to click to get from one to the other? So you might say, YC has San Francisco San Francisco is America America's Columbus Yeah, and so you you try and race through and yeah, it's an intelligence test, but it's also yeah great computer use test

That's hilarious Yeah but also I mean I imagine that there could be like a Like a big model smell like a vibe check on the computer use because if it looks very jerky and it looks confused like that's Something that might not even come across in a quantitative benchmark but a qualitative human might evaluate it differently. Yeah. Interesting.

Yeah, and also there is this whole problem, okay I have this workflow that now is working maybe 80% of the time, I'm gonna make sure that I'm able to reproduce the same kind of workflow all over again. Yeah. So we're also working on episodic memory that will let you basically use RPA 1.0, the old-fashioned RPA in UI automation for workflows that are pretty deterministic, and then say that you have a deviation

from one trajectory due to noise or changing on a webpage, then that's when you use full computer use. When it really makes sense. That makes a ton of makes sense any other Italian YC founders Are you guys hometown heroes back in the There is a wise key what's up group now, okay, they're aging like these week on the mountains

That's reason enough alone to apply to my company Anyway, thank you so much Let's bring on the next do we have uh, who do we have next? Oh delian we were just talking about you. What's up? How you doing? Oh you got that? We've been doing that when we were here. It's like big numbers, big ARs. You didn't bring the gong. Should I?

So I was a Y Combinator summer 14 company. Oh yeah. Yeah, that's right. Do you want me to go through my summer 14? Please, give us a pitch. Give us a pitch. So hi everyone. My name is Daly Naspirohov.

I'm the CEO of Nightingale. We build software that helps autism therapists that work with young children to basically help them capture data on those children's behaviors, pull that into reports that you then send off to your insurance companies to get reimbursed. Today, all this is done by paper and pencil. Super Manual takes these therapists like 30% of their workday just doing a bunch of bureaucratic actions. We cut that down, make it super fast.

They get reimbursed more quickly and they get to spend more time with the kiddos rather than on a bunch of paperwork. It's a cursor for autism. I was about to say a cursor for autism. It's a cursor for autism. So if you ever wonder where all the autism came from, it's because my first company, literally, all I did was spend time with autistic kids. Yeah, yeah, it was fantastic.

If I had some in me already, it got amplified. How did your demo day go? Did you raise? Was it hard to raise back then? It feels like everyone here can put together a million dollar seed round pretty easily. What was the comp that you used? A lot of YC companies obviously like to give some type of like, and a roll for dog walking.

Yeah, and like summer 14, you have to remember at the time, it's not like there was a ton of health care SaaS things that had worked. You had like Epic as an EMR that obviously done so well. No one really knows Epic the story fully. Yeah, and we weren't really an EMR. So honestly, I think I remember Sam at the time, because he was the head of YC back then,

two weeks before Demo Day, he basically told me your pitch is fucking trash. And then I went and, I'm not gonna say this on livestream, but yeah, I took some psychedelics on a weekend, and really thought about my pitch for that weekend. Made a lot of improvements, and then Sam after, he told me, relative to where your company's at in performance,

phenomenal presentation. But phenomenal presentation in 2014 turned into like 600K seed round. That was a fucking grind. It was like still two months after demo day, doing individual calls. And it's just like, when you look at the amount of capital that's like, whatever, the next door building.

There was like a two, somebody said there was like a two hour wait this morning. If you tried to show up like right at the start, there was like a tube. Somebody said there was like a two hour wait this morning. If you tried to show up like right at the start, there was like the line was like two blocks down. Summer 14, like we like filled up like a small little like area like cocktail area in like the computer history museum down there. So it's like I just if you just given 10 grand

to like every batch member with you, you would have a billion dollars. Yeah, I think summer 14 did have some hits that I have to go back and remember who the biggest were. Summer 2012, my batch had a ton. Coinbase, Instacart, Zapier. That was a good batch. Yeah, it was a good batch.

There were a bunch of good ones. But yeah, it's interesting to study, just like I feel you can use Demo Day. This is my first time coming to Demo Day in like I think seven years or something like that. Partially like in 2018, I went, spent a bunch of time on it, and honestly it just didn't lead to any investments.

And so I was like, at some point, what am I doing here? Then I was like, COVID really killed it off. And so I'm excited to be back. But it's also an interesting marker of the industries sort of maturity of just the amount of companies, what the companies are working on, now also the amount of comps that you can look at. In 2014, if you had said, my comp is like,

I would like to be a $100 billion publicly traded company, it's like, OK, there's basically two of those in the entire history of technology People are doing Varta for X Gotta track those guys down and forgot how to like acquire them. So we have like a desi Varta. Yeah Have you have you seen any of the hard tech companies yet any of the pitches? Gary said like 11% of the batch is hard tech Yeah, yeah, it's interesting to see like I mean I remember in like 2018 19 when I was doing like hard tech industrials defense aerospace

It was just like so uninteresting to so many people like they were all like literally like, you know We talked about this like ever at my former colleague He's just like oh like if anything is like, know, negative gross margins and like highly capex intensive send it down. And he like said that as a joke. And then everyone's realizing like actually capex intensivity is like the best mode ever. Cause like if you just build software, AI slop

can replicate it basically overnight. So yeah, I definitely looked at it, you know, just handful of them. I think it's cool to see that like YC is leaning into this. Cause it's not something that they've. They also had a couple hard runs with like Pebble was a big, was a really big like hard go because like they got so

Sherlocked by Apple with the Apple watch. Totally. Yeah. What are you going to do? Uh, but then at the same time, like there's been now like Astronis and Oaklow and like a few really even harder tech companies that have made it through and like scaled. So, uh, I said, you think is like the best like Oaklow, obviously like, you know, should probably, you know, sort of, you're trading,

but like, you know, hard to figure out, but still, but it's trying to, it feels like it's like, itlo obviously like, you know, should probably, you know, sort of, you're trading, but like, you know, hard to figure out. Yeah, hard to figure out, but still. But Astronis feels like it's like, it's got some, you know, sort of real- Yeah, get to buy a works, another one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like 300 feet down. Yeah, yeah. I admit though, like, look, I think like, I mean, if you look at, you know, the like YC deep tech,

you know, sort of portfolio and like hit rate and outcomes relative to like the FF or Dellian seed, deep tech industrial portfolio, there's definitely one that I would want to buy in the basket of and one that I wouldn't you know I mean, I shouldn't be speaking to maybe Gary's gonna fucking I think like the bull cases that like like it is great to have exactly what YC is which is an incubator and accelerator Like a pool for that type of talent to come out of and if you wind up picking over at it at some point Like that's fine, and then actually part of the ecosystem.

And yes, like you're gonna get earlier stuff, but it's nice that there's at least an ecosystem. Some of the people that go through YC with hard tech, they might become employees at these companies. They might become acquisition or acquires. It opens the Overton window for like the average day for grads and like not just work on AI. How many multi-stage VCs have pulled back

from doing demo day investing at all and just saying, you know, we're not going to try to go. I mean, I feel like in 2019, it was like the consensus thing. Like at some point, everybody was like, why are we doing this? It's just like way too many companies. They're like, you know, sort of seed rounds. You know, feel like, and again, maybe Gary's going to kick me out for this. But it's like the seed rounds felt like they were really overpriced, especially as a multi-stage

firm. It's like, well, you can just wait for the series A and like on a risk of more bases. It's not like the companies are gonna die if they don't step in. There's plenty of players. There's so many like YC specific funds that would come in and just write 100K check into tons of companies. So like everyone was getting their rounds done,

but yeah, I mean, yeah, it just speaks to like how they're playing. Also, there's this weird dynamic where YC used to say like, I don't know if you got this advice, but it was like, don't pitch any investors until YC demo day. And then everyone was like, oh, well, the game theory is like, if I'm the only one pitching before demo day,

I should do it. I get all the interest that I raise. And so there's still, I'm sure, you will take a pitch with a YC demo day founder a couple weeks earlier because they're inventive and creative and they got to you before. Totally, totally. You just might not find them through this.

I do think there's some amount of, a lot of the key to companies have already closed their rounds by the time this day happens, a couple weeks earlier because they're inventive and creative and they got to you before. You just might not find them through this. I do think there's some amount of like a lot of the companies have already closed their rounds by like the time this day happens, which was very much so not the case in 2014. 2014 was like maybe one company in the entire batch. And by the way, for what it's worth, if you study those early batches,

there was basically an extreme negative correlation between the ones that are raised early and that actually ended up being the batch returning outcomes. I remember there was one company in YC Summer 12 that had a super viral video because they were in the viral video making business. And so they got a ton of attention and they'd also kind of ramped revenue

by saying, yeah, we'll produce a video for $100,000. That's not really durable, scalable revenue. It was clearly before Clueli. It was clearly before Clueli. It was clearly before Cluely. And then there's a $60 million round before Demo Day and everyone's like, what's going on? Coinbase sitting there at eight. It's like what?

Did you see that ad? It was a company called Kotool. They did like a skit based on the deal rippling thing. No way. They went super viral. Oh, now they put a prank on it? No, they did. You gotta see this video.

It's hilarious. But they're in this batch. Yeah, yeah. They have a service on it. You've got to see this video. It's hilarious. But they're in this batch. Yeah, yeah. They have a service that will monitor Slack chats for honeypots and create honeypots for you and do all this different cybersecurity stuff. It's great. I think back on like, I just had this memory from 2017

when I was at Coastal Ventures where like, Vinod basically have like the junior team go through and like crawl through the entire batch of like everybody, like the week beforehand basically. On the Sunday night before like the Like you know, she had a Tuesday demo day. We would invite like 15 companies to present at KV On Sunday from like noon until like literally midnight We would be there like I remember like letting founders in at 1130 at night to like come pitch the firm

And it actually felt like we had this like really deep arm. It was alpha. Nobody else is doing it, etc And then literally it's like, like you said, now there's like these infinite sort of YC funds where like I actually just feel like the alpha there, on like doing the pre-work, et cetera, getting into it, it's not to say there might not be some good outcomes, but like many, many more people run that strategy, and then even the fact that something like this exists,

like the idea in 2014 that there'd be like a live show that anybody would get a fuck about and actually want to tune into to talk to YC companies, like we could barely get anybody like, you know, pay attention to any of us, let alone the idea that there's whatever going to be 15,000 people on Twitter. So yeah, this entire industry has just gotten like, we are the new Wall Street.

It's like kids grow up in 2008 being like, I want to be an investment banker. Yeah, the kid right here just said it. I knew I wanted to join YC when I was 16. And he's 26 now, so he's like a decade in making. We talked about this in relation to the Teal Fellowship recently, where it's like in 2012 And we talked about this in relation to the Teal Fellowship recently where it's like in 2012,

the off-track thing to do was to drop out, build a company, join an accelerator, work in technology. Now this is the track, and so we need to practically find what is off-track. There's a high school dropout in this batch. Yeah, yeah, I mean at this point, like the kids are in there. I mean there's an article in Business Insider today

by Julia Hornstein who wrote the article about the first article about us talking about how Like not just not even going to college at all is the new dropping out It's like just the default it's just the first is like in my year at MIT remember there's like three of us He has applied to college get accepted On this it's like yeah, Dillion you dropped out except T, but that's all they need. I had a whole riff on this. It's like, yeah, Delia, you dropped out of MIT. I knew that I would drop out if I went there, so I didn't even apply.

Exactly. I skipped even college. I did go to different college and graduated. But it's just like, yeah, yeah, you're a sucker for even having gone for a day. You paid the application fee. I didn't even go to MIT. Exactly. You paid the application fee.

You made the application fee. What a sucker. You paid a full year of tuition. God damn. Boomer. I want those $45,000 back. I could have put that in fucking Nvidia and I'd be a billionaire. Boomer mode. Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by.

Good to see you, boys. Thanks for almost blasting me in the face. We got some big news, new investment from you coming on. Oh yeah. Looking forward to it. See you tomorrow. We'll see you back to back days.

Welcome to the Demo Day stream. 2025. Good to meet you. How are you doing? I'm John. Nice to meet you, Dave. Dave Munichiello. Did you photograph us out there

or was that somebody else at GV? No, I didn't photograph you. Who was photographing you? One of your buddies, someone else at GV, Han. Okay. He took a picture of us. He took a picture of us. Put us on the time.

Oh yeah, we love the paparazzi. It was good. It was good. Can you introduce yourself for the stream? Yeah, so Dave Munichiello, Google Ventures, one of my managing partner there. I've been there about 13 years, testing in AI and enterprise software from the early days.

Lots of good stuff to do here. I was just standing in a room downstairs hanging with a bunch of folks. And Gary came in and said, hey, you got to go do this. I'm here. Thanks for coming on. I'm here. Excited to hang.

Yeah. What trends are you following? What are you seeing that you like? What's interesting? Yeah, I'm here. Thanks for coming on. I'm here. Excited to hang. Yeah. What trends are you following? What are you seeing that you like? What's interesting? Well, first, break YC into chapters for us from your point of view. I'm sure you've invested in companies at this point, maybe not right around demo day, but in every batch.

I mean, I was in Cambridge in the early days in grad school when Paul Graham and those folks were in Cambridge doing their thing. Wow. No way. At that point in time, YC was like the cool place to be connected to. And I think, you know, a lot of us, I met, you know, a partner of mine that now runs our life sciences team and I co-lead our digital team here at GV. We met in Cambridge and we used to like get really excited about any Cambridge YC events. That's amazing. So the place has totally evolved.

Oh, totally. It's a machine. It's an institution. Multiple chapters, totally. Was fortunate enough to do GitLab in the early days. So like New Dome from day one. And like, Sid has always shared his enthusiasm. Patrick Collison is a portfolio founder, comes in and talks to the batch.

And then we hear the cool stuff from him. What was the perception around GitLab at the time? I feel like I remember it and it was kind of like discounted because it was open source. GitHub was already such a success. It was like, how are they going to do anything when there's already this winner? I literally just stepped out before this step out to do the earnings call with the CEO and the CFO to like do the investor

callback because we're public market shareholders of the company. Oh, wow. So we invested just after the series B. Yeah, we actually passed on the series B. And we had a bunch of concerns. And if I look at those concerns, they were. They hold the mic a little bit closer, just anglers. So yeah, they were one of the first companies to be remote only. Oh, yeah, that was a thing.

And GitLab. Yeah. We're like, this remote only thing seems strange. How are they going to run a company like this? Yeah. CID is extremely technical. Yeah. We're like, this remote-only thing seems strange. How the hell are they going to run a company like this? Cyd is extremely technical. Sure. And I think remote only works really well for him because of the way that he shows up as a human. But he writes everything down.

And so that works for a subset of people in society. So we wrote down GV, past, and still here. I mean, we talked constantly. Like, passing out a company is just like, this stage isn't right for us But we want to continue to talk to you over time, right? Now I'm assuming you don't have a lot of FOMO you guys write bigger checks We've met something like 30 companies so far you are you are ready checks even at this early stage

We write checks into YC companies with love YC companies. Yeah, so even though we're multi-stage Yeah, hundred million dollars into a public company, we're just talking about, we also do seed and everything in between A's our sweet spot is and B's. We do a like an event a few weeks before demo day every year with all the YC founders. And then we know all the group partners, right? So they're like constantly paying us with ideas. That's great. That's great. What is the integration with Google like now?

We're entirely separate. Entirely separate. Yeah, so we raised capital from Google. They're our sole LP. It's an LP relationship. Yeah, because it's such an interesting dynamic, because on the one hand, that could be incredible value added if it's like, hey, we'll introduce you.

You can sell into Google. The incredible thing is we have a stable LP that's there forever. Permanent capital, essentially. Plenty of capital and an appetite for risk. So we have a great LP that we have a half an hour conversation with every couple of years and plenty of capital. Well, we don't spend any time pontificating about where we think the market is. It's why I had to call our comms people before I came on here is like, we don't, we don't usually do marketing or like comms events or podcasts or stuff like this.

Excited to talk to you guys. Of course. But yeah, I think we're unique in that we spend all of our time with founders. So I shared the like, it's like, I you guys. Of course. But yeah, I think we're unique in that we spend all of our time with founders. Yeah. So I shared the like. It's such a hack.

I mean, I think you're the envy of every no matter how successful our GP friends and the GPs on the show having a dynamic where 100 people could call you on a Saturday at 5 p.m. And you kind of owe them your time to some degree. And that's like that LP dynamic. I mean, I talked to, obviously, tons of friends at the GP level across different firms. It does keep them sharp.

They get a lot of pressure from LPs, constant questions, deal flow, connectivity. I think that's really positive. But we don't have to deal with a lot of that stuff. And so we spend time connecting with founders and other GPs. What do you think the nature of those questions usually are? Is it just like trying to understand markets and trends and how the funds are positioned?

Questions from LP. Yeah, I haven't really sat on that side. I've been to like one or two LP days for P-Funds. So what's this transformer thing? I keep thinking about transformers. I didn't want to say it, but I think that's kind of the vibe. I've seen the movie. But give me the rest.

I mentioned this idea of like we invested in you know get live in the early days And now they're public company hedge funds invest in the stock sure call us to ask us for our perspective I'm sure I'm sure and they're thinking about like what happens in two weeks, and I imagine LPs are like slightly farther out You know what's what's happening today? What's hot today? Are you in the right deals that sort of things? of like, you know, what's what's happening today? What's hot today? Are you in the right deals that sort of things? Our LP doesn't care about any of that stuff. We don't have the conversation about like, what what we're in what we're not in etc.

Do you have a generational founders? Do you have a particular understanding of how the startup landscape is interfacing with the mag seven the big tech companies right now were an interesting time, the big tech companies, they all kind of like went from a hundred billion in market cap to a trillion very easily and it was kind of like, it was kind of like the easiest 10X of their entire career

in kind of some sort of unexpected way. You would think that would be the hardest one, but a lot of them just did it. At the same time, it feels like there's more opportunity for startups than ever, but the big companies have more resources than ever. What are you talking to founders specifically around a I wondering constantly like is a I going to make incumbents stronger?

Yes, it seems like a sustaining innovation. Totally. And yet I've been talking to companies that are doing millions of dollars in ARR over two days. That's right. That's right. And I think the question for us is, you know, does each incumbent, each big SaaS company, do they bolt on AI? Sure. Do they acqui-hire acquire AI? I know.

Yeah, we're seeing this with the Windsor phone. Does every big tech company need a? 49% investment. Yeah. It's a new hot structure. That's the new M&A. It's a new hot structure. I'll take 49 and all your best people.

Yeah, I could do this valuation or double it, and you get half. It's like the same number. But I think having loads of capital best people. Yeah, I could do this valuation or double it and you get half. It's like the same number. But I think having loads of capital right now in a time when like the seats are shifting in tech is quite interesting. The mag seven might be the mag 70 in the next 10 years, right? You might have a different seed. I like that.

Add a zero to it. I would like more big tech companies. We're on the side of big tech and so we want there to be as much big tech as possible. I mean, this is actually little tech. The 70 would be little tech. This is little tech. No, but we're fans of all of it.

All of it. Just tech. High technology. We're fans of tech. Yes. Totally. Yeah, I think this idea that people want to say AI is good for big tech or it's an extending innovation, but it can be good for both.

It can be so transformative. The internet was good for some big companies that adapted well to it. It was good for a bunch of completely novel ideas. And so we don't have to like pick one and pick a side. It can be an extending innovation and it can also enable all of this. Yeah, I think we're in this exciting place where like the most high agency humans

in our lives that we're all connected to, they're empowered not just to have like the underlying cloud Be present for them, but intelligence be present for them. Yeah, and so now they're building. I met a company out there It was like one person. Yeah, no engineers Already have tons of revenue like I think that yeah, he told me he's gonna be the first billion dollar company Oh, he's going for it. He's right. I was like I always get up on that because it's like If you attach if you attach Just feel vanity metric. It's a van. It's a total

I mean it'll be amazing when it happens Yeah, but a total vanity metric that can like guide you towards bad decision-making It feels like it might like happen accidentally. Yeah Maybe or the way to do it million and then lay off every other person but yourself Yeah, yeah the private equity guys are really going to be the ones to do it. They're going to be like, yeah, we bought a 10,000 person company and we fired everyone except for one person.

There are a few VC companies right now looking at VC firms that are looking at the PE roll up. Sure, yeah. By something that has massive distribution. Have you looked at anything like that? We have looked at them. We have passed on a lot of them. I think it feels like a PE play where

you're trying to get the multiple to change as a result of the industry It's all a question Right a lot of the founders that are running that strategy They just should change the structure and just say like we're gonna run a PE playbook here and we're gonna be they do it We're gonna be two and twenty Yeah because it's if you if you can raise 20 million on on 100 for the strategy and keep like a lot of the economics sure it's great for the team but it should probably be like the basically the comp incentive structure should be look more like. Totally. Yeah. You guys are friends with a buddy of mine Sean McGuire's been here a couple of course Sean introduced me to a founder on Friday night at like nine o'clock over text and I respond back and the guys like do you want to meet tonight?

Nice. Do you want to meet tomorrow morning? Like I'll come to you. I live like an hour away. I'll drive to you. I'm like that that kind of high agency human is gonna we're sort of meeting today for sure. Yeah. The thing I hope we get some more of these companies on we've had a lot of developer tool teams on. I think this idea of like business automation is being heavily explored around agents. But we were talking with Dylan Patel last week and he says like the next category besides consumer tech with LLMs, like chat GPT, then you have CodeGen as big revenue categories, and this third category of just actual business automation. So how do you just make the machine work? And everybody's thinking about it in the concept of agents, which is kind of, I think, almost a simplistic way

to view these things. And what is the next iteration of that where it's like actually like an autonomous system that doesn't have to interact like a regular employee it's sort of so we'll see. Yeah, I mean, we're seeing it across an organization like a Sierra or a decagon. Yeah, you know, in Harvey is a legal company that we're invested in. Yeah, there's some medical company. So like every vertical has a eye, but it looks a lot like a human it's like replacement of a human it's right replacement of a human but how do you replace 20 humans at once across functionally yeah how do you worry when a YC deal that you're looking at gets gets hot do you worry

we don't worry at all no I mean historically you know if you do look. But I mean, historically, I think if you do look at the data, a lot of these companies, some of the hotter companies at Demo Day don't end up always. I mean, we're investing in super hot companies at the A and the B. Sure. And the most sought after companies get marked up incredibly. Right?

So it's a sign of the heat is a sign of enthusiasm from great people. Talent, opportunity. Totally. Totally. And so you. Totally, totally. And so, like, you have to, if you're choosing to get exposed to that asset class, you have to be willing to pay the prices

to enter that asset class and play in that asset class. Here, the challenge is that you have, like, three months of data. Yeah. And so, you're talking to a company. Yeah, it's like the company that grows revenue the fastest in two weeks, three months, whenever they actually launch,

is not necessarily the company that's gonna grow revenue the fastest over two years three years we've seen that a bunch of times we reinvest in a YC company and then after demo day it kind of it kind of chills out a little bit yeah and it reaccelerates yeah there's a founder in this batch yeah totally founder in this batch that raised I think like almost eight million dollars of uncapped convertible notes. And so it's just like humans. Dog, you're an absolute dog. Party round.

He's incredible. Found this incredible team. And I understand why people are sort of leaning in to work with him. But that makes it pretty difficult. Yeah, yeah. You're thinking about that next call in a year or two with Google being trying to explain entering a party round on an uncapped note.

It's easy to justify if it works out. RLP literally has no visibility into the deal. Yeah, sure. That's good. That's good. So maybe it's easier for you to do it. But for us, the thing that we care about is we want to be your lifelong partner.

Like, the thing that we think about for founders is how can we be there for them over every round and into the future. What's your messaging around signal risk? Because I think there's this, like, if you're truly a multi-stage fund, you could do an early round. And you could say, we're good with our ownership right now, and we're going to help you raise this round.

But we actually, I think this concept of signaling risk is totally possible for you to want to invest in a company today and three years from now. So just because you don't do the in-between rounds or this is the conversation I was having when Gary walked up and said he's talking to you guys so I was talking to Neeraj from general catalyst. Oh, yeah, we were chatting about like do you play when the price gets to an uncomfortable place? What signals that send like you're you're essentially sending a signal to the market that your firm is excited about this company They have a separate seed program.

So they can kind of categorize this as like, this is a seed bet. We're gonna put a million dollars in this company. We'll see how it goes. We don't have a separate seed program. When we do an early stage bet, we use similar criteria to what we use in the A. Obviously they don't yet have A metrics, but the question is like, if they had A metrics, would we lead the A in this company? So there is a big signal when we do it. So it makes it harder for us to do like 30 or 40 companies.

We talked to 30 or 40, we might do a handful. Yeah, that makes sense. Very cool, well, thank you so much. Thank you guys. You're welcome. Fantastic. Great to have you on. Thank you, take care.

Good to meet. And we are ready for our next team or individual or investor or Yapper. Who will it be? Who will it be? We will be surprised because we are at YC Demo Day 2025. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Good to see you already have the hat.

Hi, how are you doing? You're looking around for the camera. You're on live, you're on a live stream. You'll need to introduce yourself. You can wear your hat. You don't need to wear that. Whatever you, whatever you, yeah, don't wear that. Thanks for being here, I'm John.

John, what's up, Andrew? Jordy, how are you guys don't wear that. Thanks, man. I'm John. John, what's up? Andrew. Jordy, how are you guys? Introduce yourself. Hi, my name's Andrew Lee. I'm a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, both working in the Games Fund and also at A16Z Speedrun. Very cool. Are there any games companies here today?

There are no game companies here, which is somewhat sad. I thought you guys were going to suck them all into Speedrun. Is that your guys' fault? It is your fault. It's your fault. There's about four or five of them. I would say that for YC, there's about four or five consumers to companies, which is pretty good.

So you can look at those. Oh, for sure, for sure. Four or five in the whole batch. I mean, there's like five or six-ish. But here's the good thing. I mean, there were a couple companies who previously in the past were B2B companies. They're like, you know what?

This is really boring. Yeah. I don't want to do this. And a number of them ended up in gaming and they ended up in entertainment, so that was exciting. And then also, I just generally think that if you're gonna build something that your mom or your 70-year-old degen friend is gonna go and play,

then yeah, it makes sense for them to go ahead and build B2B stuff as well. Yeah. I wanna talk about the Games Fund. I've been super interested in how hard it is to get into the hot games because they kind of blow up out of nowhere. Yeah. Yeah.

You're getting on a plane to Sweden and you're like... It's more like invested in movies or something. By the time you get there, they've doubled their R. Yeah. There was this Bellatro game that was a massive thing. There was Among Us. Right. Was that the one?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that was probably one of the top ones ever played during COVID. During COVID, like these kind of like flash of the pan games that become very viral. I don't understand if they're like necessarily good businesses. So like, how are you thinking about finding great games or games related companies or even just consumer companies? Like, what are you looking for because the signal seems so much more noisy than in, if there's noise around a

Like an enterprise dev tool company like they're probably selling that and it's probably gonna be pretty sticky Whereas like Bellatro, I don't know if it seems like local funk I think his name is fantastic developer, but who knows if that's like a you're gonna turn into like Activision I think fundamentally for us the way that we tend to think about it is there's there's like a couple different things that They care about one is that if there's a couple different things to care about. One is that if there's a large audience that has a bunch of folks that are going to play, if you do one innovation in that audience that makes sense, for example, big fans of League of Legends

if you're all out there, if you're trying to create a MOBA that sort of makes sense. But I think that for us, honestly, the big wave we see is in the world of AI. Whether it's changes in 3D animation, we fundamentally think that the future of entertainment is actually going be there's gonna be an AI Pixar mark my words Someone's gonna make an AI Pixar It may not actually even be Pixar right because usually what happens is we tend to think that like an incumbent for example

Like, you know Disney or something like that Exactly is gonna make like the next thing or potentially take the next wave But I don't know if you guys see any of these video videos. Oh incredible I mean the Bible Bros the whatever like like stormtroopers I'm like it's astounding and it's and I don't think that something that could ever occur there's like that it's sort of innovators dilemma that's occurring with existing folks so even just from like a PR pressure like I don't know if you saw that that show the studio there's this whole sequence where

they're very worried about the casting for this new Kool-Aid movie, and then it is revealed that no one cares about the casting, all they care is that they used AI a little bit, and it's this really hot button issue, there's massive PR backlash, and so that's this counter positioning where if you come to the market and you say like, yeah, we're an AI Pixar, we're just making AI stuff,

you don't have the expectation. People expect Pixar not to use that. That's right. How are you thinking about investing at the game layer versus kind of the infrastructure layer? It feels like there's a bunch of new tooling around just creating these generative worlds that can turn into games.

And is the Roblox of AI Roblox or is it something new? Yeah, it's interesting because I think the thing is what we've seen is, well, we go where the founders go. And it seems the number one area that the founders are going is into more tooling and primarily using AI. I mean, there was a bunch of stuff. There's still a ton of, I think, experiments happening in the Web3 layer, potentially in the content layer. But the main problem is, honestly, is that distribution is tough.

I don't know if you guys have invested in any consumer companies lately, but it's hard. It's hard because there's a reason why every DTC company has basically had all their margin eaten by all the big tech companies, right? And fundamentally, I think that's the same problem. And Steam, which is usually the platform for folks who wanna build games, is not nearly as liquid as it possibly could be. So as a result, I think the thing is, the one thing that I think we've seen

that's very positive out there for those- Liquid as in there's not enough demand coming from Steam itself? Or really that your ability to get more bang for buck Right like that. It's fast enough that you don't have to pay a huge amount of marketing spend Yeah, it's it's gone a lot tougher. You have to be very good at it So there's great teams that are able to do that gaming going on on there too with like wishlisting driving Sales and so you're paying people to wishlist your product and it's like there's kind of schemes on top of schemes, right?

We could do it. I mean, there's only people who do that, but it just seems that if you create a 10X product that is able to grab some great cut consumers out there, that seems to be something that has natural growth. I mean, I'm sure we're all familiar with Mid Journey. That was built, it's built on Discord. Yeah, yeah, it's amazing.

Still in built on Discord. It's not as it's amazing. It's still in built on Discord. It's not as if it was something that naturally would have grown. So the thing is, I think the, and obviously I'm talking about Veo because that's like my latest thing that I'm just doom scrolling on every single night. But when you can basically grow from zero

to all of a sudden 120,000 followers with four videos over the course of like two days, that's an astounding thing. And if someone is able to do that, that shows me that there's like a natural consumer poll. And that's the thing is pretty interesting. So Mark, my words, I still think that there will be an AI Pixar. I also think that fundamentally the world of AI tech and entertainment are going to converge and we're going to basically see somebody create that 10x product that then hopefully just basically skips all the distribution problems. but I don't know who mine are you are you seeing are you seeing enough here are

you seeing enough weird stuff right like there's this concept of like you know kind of trying to leverage AI and the sort of existing paradigm but when you think about the intersection of like tech and AI and entertainment and and sort of like you know I can just imagine like entirely new ways of playing games you already have kind of seen this on some of these you know people basically creating games within games but yeah but yeah are people being are people being like is the average pitch you know really trying to rethink things from from the ground up or is it hey we have it we think we can build the next candy crush yeah I think a lot well for us as a fun we'd want to obviously have people who are gonna be willing to build the next unicorn company but that doesn't mean that I think great developers out there won't create amazing experiences I definitely agree with you that you have to basically aim for the weird like you have to do things that are basically in the frontier what's possible because otherwise then

what you're doing is you're most likely just like basically doing a me too which is that hard because in a distribution channel, we have to basically pay for your customer acquisition. That's like super hard. I think something that's also pretty interesting that I was telling some folks about was that the one thing that's interesting about both consumer experiences and games is that if there's a limitation, take for example on,

let's say that you can only network 20 people on a server together. Well, the way you do that then is you just make it so your game has 20 people playing all at the same time and there's this thing called Fortnite and then 20 people have to kill each other and then eventually ends up with only 20 that you'll be able to go network with each other.

So the good thing is you can just basically change, it's not like a bug, it's actually a feature. That's kind of interesting. But I think also generally what we're seeing in AI though is when it's, you guys are probably familiar with this, which is the sort of cycle between B2B to the app side, which is basically you have B2B infrastructure that allows you to, for example,

to create really powerful video models. That then allows you to have apps that use those video models and then create content that create new network models, for example, and then that leads into other things happening with the info layer. We're seeing a lot of that happening. Unreal Engine was a B2B play.

Exactly. Birth Fortnite. And then there's another company in the Andreessen portfolio that does kind of like world scale sharding so that you can like basically build like a big MMO that you can walk through. I forget what this company is, but they were doing like some scientific computing

and some economic analysis. That was years ago. But there's obviously a lot of work done on the infrastructure layer And are they gonna be the one to build the the next great consumer game? Maybe maybe not maybe it builds maybe it's built on top of their platform. What are you seeing in VR? In VR, let's see here So we have there is one great company that came through Before from from speeder in the past and the very around the first one was this company called Trass Games.

Okay. So, you know, it's one of those things where basically I think just like people grew up in the mobile generation you need to have people who grew up in the VR generation. Sure. So if you talk to anybody who's under the age of like 16 most of them will be like, I play a lot of VR. Really?

It's crazy. Like they all go home, they just play VR a lot. And they have to obviously have the device installed. But for them, they spend a lot of time there. So we backed this team that was like a bunch of teenagers who like, they won a bunch of Apple Awards. And then they're just like, look, we just spent all our time in VR.

So they built a game that basically is taking one of the bigger ones, attacking one of the bigger ones, which is Gorilla Tag. They made a game that is astounding. Their most recent game actually, it's called Yeeps. Yeeps actually has, I can't describe it because I'm too old. But basically it's like, we're all in a world together

and we get to go and do stuff together, but then we all collect yeeps, we yeep at each other. And it's like- We're yeeping. Yeah, we're yeeping at all the yeeps. All the shout outs to all the yeeps out there. We're yeeping at maxing. But they're doing great because the thing is,

I think ultimately it's not just a hangout spot for a lot of these kids, but it is ultimately taking advantage of what VR and the general install base. I still think that VR still needs a shot to the arm in terms of, we all know this, that it probably needs more installs. It probably needs a final way there.

It needs a lower churn relative to the device sales. That's right That's right, or or the device sales have to be way less expensive Yeah, or find a way to you know just get as good of sales as the meta ray bang glasses potentially, right? That's what we need VR games that are truly addicting not just novel. Yeah Remember I remember like you so like And the kids love it too. With the original PlayStation Metal Gear Solid, that game was like 100 hours. Or like Final Fantasy VII. That was a 100 hour experience.

GTA IV. That was like a 100 hour experience. And I've played a lot of VR games, have yet to find one that it's like, okay, the progression in this game is so addicting that I need to keep putting it on to play. It's like more like, okay, it's a cool demo. I set a high score, okay, I'm done. I'm not like, I need to finish this. I need to know where the story goes.

And it's hard because it's a very expensive investment. I mean, I think that's why it's easier, honestly, if you're gonna innovate in the world of entertainment, innovate on that B2B layer, right? Which is where we're seeing it. We're seeing a bunch of AI sort of video creation tools. We had one company, Hydra, who came through, who was honestly just astounding.

When the Studio Ghibli content started exploding, people were like, well, how can I animate the Studio Ghibli content? And then everyone was using Hydra as a result. Oh, yeah, I saw that. I saw your partner do that. Can we have a Studio? So the magic of Studio Ghibli was

that it could one shot these beautiful outputs. And has there been, are you anticipating that kind of moment for sort of ephemeral gaming where I could like take a picture of the three of us and say like make a boxing game where we can like fight and you get swords and then it's like it creates that and it's like fun and viral. Can that happen in the near, like, are you expecting that at all? Well, never say never.

I think that ultimately we have to get past this sort of distribution problem. But my hope is that it gets a mid-journey moment like we've had in the past. And the good thing is, I mean, I've talked to a lot of investors about this, that I think a lot of folks are in that cycle right between B2B back to the sort of like app layer,

is a bunch of the investors are pretty interested in, obviously, the B2B back to the sort of like app layer is a bunch of the investors are pretty interested in obviously the B2B AI side. And I think that will then drive a lot of innovation which then gets you the 10X here. And hopefully someone builds a good network then you have sort of like unwarranted or really sort of differentiated customer acquisition. That makes a ton of sense.

Well, thank you so much for joining us. This was fantastic. Of course. Come back on. Good time to you guys. Come on when there's big game news. Of course, of course. Good games correspondent. I'm gonna take this hat. Please do it. Enjoy it. All right, see you so much for joining us. This was fantastic. Come back. Good time. You guys, come on when there's big game news. Of course. Of course. The game's correspondent. I'm going to take this hat.

Please do it. Enjoy it. All right. See you guys. Look at Charlie. Have fun out there. Let's bring in the next person. This guy is actually eating data.

Why is it Day 25? Eat data. Make chunks. Make chunks. Welcome to the stream. I'm John. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, John.

Can you introduce yourself? My name is Shreyush. I am the co-founder of Chonky. Chonky? Chonky. Chonky. That's amazing. Company, yes. What do you do?

We take really complex documents, we split them up into meaningful pieces, such that one piece is one idea. And then we send your LLM only the data it needs to answer questions. Give me an example of a really complicated document. Financial reports. OK.

You've got graphs. You've got actual text data paragraphs. You've got tables. And if you're asking about it. And tech keys are so annoying, because there's like so much boilerplate, you need to just skip to the right thing. Exactly. Yes, exactly. And like got tables. And if you're asking about it. And 10Ks are so annoying because there's like so much boilerplate you need to just skip to the right thing. Exactly.

Yes, exactly. And like most of the time when you're asking questions to an LLM, you really only need one table. Or maybe you need a summary. That's it. Why don't I just throw all of that in a big context window, Gemini, 1 million tokens or something, and then just ask it what's going on?

It'll work with like maybe one PDF, but you have a whole database of PDFs. You've got like 100 page PDFs, thousands of those, 10,000s of those. You've got schematics, which are really complex. Models get confused. We actually ran this Eval yesterday after the price drop on 03, which is we took relatively simple documents. We took classic literature, you know, David Copperfield, David Zrabler, everything like that.

And then we gave that to 03. We asked very pointed questions. 03 got a retrieval accuracy of 75% Okay, great. We chunked the data through chunky then we asked you the same thing always 100% always My favorite name since last YC batch which was a company called pig Yeah, you that was I think a trend here you just song large animals I mean, it's just it's just it's gonna stick we're gonna we're talking about this next demo day and talk about the pipeline I'm through I have a bunch of huge PDFs on s3 or something. I feed it into your to your system. Am I getting?

Postgres table am I getting a MongoDB like unstructured? Getting embeddings. Yes, so it's like a vector database. Yeah, so you get embeddings out You can put it on your own vector database. Oh, we can also wrap around your vector database. That's totally up to you. Okay, is really developer friendly. The idea is to just make a dev tool that people just enjoy using and they can have it be two lines of code, five lines of code, whatever it is. So what's actually happening with it's not open source, right? It is open. So it is open.

So we have an open core strategy. Okay. And so we are, we are like open source. First, we started as a side project on the open source and we love the open source first We started as a side project on the open source and we love open source So so is this something that I should be running like it in like an ingest process as I'm generating new large documents I'm chunking them and then loading them into my vector database, which I may be also hosting I think Chonk, but if you're building a code gen tool, then you want to live Chonk Okay, yeah And so if you're doing code gen on the fly,

or if you're working with a corpus that's changing all the time, then you want to do it live. Did you come in? You came into YC with this idea. You already had it as an open source project? Yes. Yes. We had an open source project all set up in February.

And we came into YC with this idea. How many people on the scene? It's just me and my friend from seventh grade. Just the boys in the track. me and my friend from seventh grade. Just the boys. So many. So many. So many. It's just the boys group chat.

Made it out of the group chat. And then we're now in our seats. Give us some statistics. He made it out of the GC. How many chunks have you chunked? How many stars do you have on GitHub? How much revenue are you making? What do you got for us?

Oh boy. On the quantitative metrics side. So the metrics side we like are, we've got over 180,000 downloads. Very nice. And we've got over 200 projects using us. Wow. We're core dependency on projects like Llama Index.

Oh, cool. And we've got like 10 to 12 batch companies using us. Cool. Good and bad coming in from there on. Fantastic. Round's already done? What was that? Round's already done?

Round is almost done. We're trying to wrap it up this week. Very good. Thank you. Preliminary. Yes. Just weighing our options and just like making sure by Friday it'll be done. That's amazing.

Amazing. Well, good luck out there. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Never stop Tronking. Never stop Tronking. We'll be following you. What's the domain?

CHONKE.AI. And if you want this merch, it's SHOP.CHONKE.AI. Oh, he's already selling merch. He's selling merch. He's selling merch. Let's bring in the next participant of the Demo Day stream. And if you want this merch, it's shop.chonky.ai. Shop.chonky. He's selling merch. He's selling merch. Let's bring in the next participant of the Demo Day stream if we have one.

We got Godzilla. Welcome to Demo Day 2025. We are live from Y Combinator in San Francisco. What's going on? Great to meet you. Nice to meet you. I'm John. I'm Cinnamon.

Hi, I'm John. Oh shit, nice to meet you. What's going on? Can you introduce yourselves? Yeah, I'm Cinnamon. I'm a mechanical Abhijit, nice to meet you. What's going on? Can you introduce yourselves? Yeah, I'm Cinnamon. I'm a mechanical engineer by background. Cool. Built hardware for Apple, Google, Slack.

Wow. Hardware? Hardware. Hardware for Slack. Yeah. What do they have? RF X-Way, oh sorry, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Oh, that.

Not SLAC, not SLAC. Okay, that makes more sense. What hardware device did I miss? Good clarifying, yeah. Cool, awesome makes more sense. What hardware device did I miss? Good clarifying. Cool, awesome. So I'm Abhijit. I worked as a researcher at Stanford, a researcher at Harvard.

I was like an intern at Intel. Cool. Built a lot of stuff, I guess. Can you pull up on the mic a little bit more? Yeah, absolutely. And then tell us what your company does. Yeah, so we're GoDella. We're building a frontier physics model

for mechanical engineers. So currently, AM models can't handle physics accurately, because a lot of them are language-based. Yes. Ours are different. Ours are built to handle physics accurately, which means it can be used as a faster, cheaper replacement to simulations and physical prototypes.

This is something that I think a lot of labs like to promise, right? Solving. It was in Simalvin's thought post yesterday. Yeah, they like to bring up this idea of solving these problems in physics. So walk me through it. Sounds like you're actually training a model. Is it all reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards or are you generating a whole bunch of training data? Is there a human data labeling component? Like what is the pipeline to create

what you're creating? So at a core, we extract embedded physics from data and that makes it generalizable. Okay. Did you want to share more? Yeah. So at a core, we extract embedded physics from data, and that makes it generalizable. OK. Abhay, did you want to share more about that? Yeah, so we don't use reinforcement learning or anything. It's basically like this sort of encoding framework, where we actually take the mesh itself.

We work with meshes, right? Because we're in simulation and stuff. So we take the fluid mesh, and then we take encoder into this lower dimensional space, and that allows you to learn the actual physics of the system. Interesting. And this allows, and when you do symbolic regression on the latent space, you get a

lot more generalizability than you would get with regular models. When did you guys start working on this? Did you bring it into YC or did you pivot to this at some point? We brought it into YC. So we were TAing a computational mechanics class together at Sanford, which was teaching undergrads in mechanical engineering how to use the traditional simulation software. Kind of bred a hatred for those softwares. Meanwhile, Abhijit is doing insane research at Stanford to use ML to model a physical world in this crazy accurate race. He's like building ML models for Intel that are replacing months of trial and error

in their plasma edge process. And I realized like, hey, there's this huge opportunity to out with these old simulators, let's bring physics-informed ML to the broader group of engineers who could really benefit from these faster, cheaper answers. Okay, try and make it a little bit more concrete for me. I'm familiar with like CFD, computational fluid dynamics. I have an engine and I'm trying to simulate

how the air will flow over the jet that I'm building. Is that an example that we could use to kind of build off of, is it just faster inference than calculating everything deterministically? Is that the goal? Yeah, absolutely. Like all of simulation,

every time you start with a simulation tool, the engineer is starting with a question, right? You've got a question in your 3D model. You want to know how is, what is drag on that? Yeah, exactly. How's that going to change as I change thickness or angle of attack of my hair? Now imagine instead of needing to learn a simulation software You can ask with natural language drop in your CAD and get simulation quality results instantly interesting we say instantly

It's four thousand five hundred times faster than yeah a benchmark GPU accelerated solver that we tested against Wow Wow, okay? What's the good market like? I mean, imagine you're selling to like very large aerospace defense companies or who else is building stuff? I mean, Apple, Google, these companies could buy this? Yeah, exactly. I think the huge benefit of physics informed ML is we can tackle problems that traditional simulators cannot tackle, multi-physics, multi-scale, make it extremely feasible to tackle those problems. And we can also fill in the gaps where your idealized equations don't suffice to capture the complexity of the problem.

So these problems that Apple, Google, maybe aerospace are throwing millions in terms of R&D and building and testing, we can give you accurate physics models that can replace your need to physically build and test the product. So. And they can probably like reality check

your faster results with the traditional System that they've in place whenever they need to Traction It's been great. So we launched two weeks ago. We entered a 25k year contract with an engineering firm to replace Ansys which is 30 billion dollar incumbent however I think our stronger pull right now is we have some exciting opportunities with enterprise customers to Ansys, which is $30 billion incumbent. However, I think our stronger pull right now is we have some exciting opportunities with enterprise customers to, again, tackle those highest value problems where there is no solution for.

For modeling something like drop simulation, right? There is no great simulator that gives you that fast, accurate answers, even though it's governed by the QXS. Yeah, simulation software gets sound person accuracy or something. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. It's also very slow though Yeah, two weeks to compute a drop simulation on a 14-inch MacBook Pro today So like these really high value problems for enterprise customers We have the opportunity to go apply our software and they'll give them more accurate answers. Very cool How big is the team? Where are you going next? How's the fundraise going? Yeah, it's three core one advisor The fundraise is going well. We're just about well, iters going well. We're just about, well, it's very exciting. We're just-

Yeah, it's good. Amazing. Whoever's bidding, I'm sure they're gonna watch this. Congratulations on a fantastic demo day. We've been giving out hats to folks who come on the stream. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Nice to meet you guys.

Congratulations. We will talk to you soon. Let's bring in the next team or whoever it is. We got Dan. Don't forget to go to vanta.com, adio.com, numeralhq.com, adquick.com, aidsleep.com, Wanda, Bessel, Vinnier. Look at the bottom bar. What's going on guys?

Hey, how you doing? Dan. Dan, what's happening? Good to have you on the stream. Nice to meet you. Welcome to the show. Can you introduce yourself for the stream? I'm Linus.

Linus, pleasure. It is a pleasure. Does anyone want me to go into any more detail? Sure. Yeah, a little bit. Let's get Justin's name. My name's Justin. And what are you guys building?

We're building Den. Okay, what is Den? Den is cursor for knowledge workers. Okay, break it down. We're an AI native Slack replacement. If you load up to the app, you'll see a bunch of AI agents. Slack replacement.

Slack replacement. OK, so I'm not in Slack at all. I'm just in Den when I'm doing knowledge work. OK. What is the typical knowledge worker experience with Slack? Because I feel like there's a lot of just managerial overhead status updates that are going on. This sounds like something a little bit more mature

than that. What am I doing in Den? In Slack, there's a lot of kind of lost threads. Okay. Like kind of lost information. Sure. And just a lot of communication. Yeah.

Ultimately, but no actions. Yeah. With Den, we're all about actions and we work backwards from, you know, what you need to get the task done. So. Okay. Give me an example. Yeah, so I guess in Slack,

you would be asking, you know, your coworker for how many users signed up last month. That's gonna be like an async process where like, literally just happened in the Slack. One of my Slacks I'm in was like, are we reviewing last week's numbers or the week before? The week before was a developer on a team talking to the CEO. Yeah.

Sure. You know, in Slack, that task might just get lost in the background. Totally. You don't know what the status is in Den, and AI agents just to pick that up. So we're all about that multiplayer aspect. Your inputs are building the agents

and configuring your tools and configuring the tasks. And then we provide the multiplayer environment where you might be orchestrating thousands of AI agents. Yeah, talk about the path of AI agents, long running agents. We have this idea of 10 minute AGI, 20 minute AGI, Yeah, talk about the path of AI agents, long running agents. We have this idea of like 10 minute AGI, 20 minute AGI, oh three pro seems to work for 13 minutes every time you kick something off.

Are you putting these things on cron jobs? Is there some sort of like long running process that can run through my den installation and say, hey, like every single hour, I want you to check on things that aren't getting done. Pretty much. We break it down into three things. like you've got your ad hoc tasks. Yep. You've got your yeah Crunch job tasks your schedule tasks and you also have things that kind of respond to triggers

It's like oh hey run this task whenever I receive an email got it. Okay, there was this idea I think it was an AI 2027 around the idea that like an AI would just spin up a slack instance and use that Yeah, I would use slack to coordinate with each other. And I can see a world where that makes sense. What was the catalyst for you guys to realize that you needed to kind of rethink the communication stack from the ground up to serve agents over, you know, first and foremost over humans? I guess what we realized was that there's tools like Zapier, tools like Relevance AI, but they're external to your communication source. Knowledge workers spend

more than 80% of their time in Slack and Notion, and so we wanted to bring the agents to where people actually did the work. And the most important thing is now the agents can escalate tasks through like the CEO, the head of customer success, whereas they couldn't before because they were siloed. So we had to build it from the ground up for agents in that way. Do you think we'll still call ourselves knowledge workers in ten years if knowledge is instantly accessible by all machines Agent when agency workers because knowledge is commoditized now and intelligence is too cheap to meter like taste curators Yeah, exactly taste makers. That's the only job that will remain in the future. Maybe who? How you guys are creating a platform that other agents can work on top of. How do you rank the quality of different agents across categories?

Obviously there's coding agents, we're friends with the cognition team and the factory AI team and things like that. So coding agents are great. I haven't heard a lot of people saying, like, I love my AI BDR yet, right? Maybe there's some use cases, maybe they don't wanna talk about it, but like, what are the categories

that you guys are most excited about? Yeah, deep research is obviously another category. Yeah, agent's workflow. I think it's gonna slowly move down, like the stack. I spoke with Sholto Douglas, who is a researcher at Anthabricks. We have great coding agents and kind of math agents because researchers like math and coding. Interesting. But you know, it's not just the verifiable reward thing.

It's that as well. It's that as well. I think we're kind of building in the infrastructure that's going to allow those iterations to happen where you do actually get like a really good BDR agent. We're already building customer success agents that haven't existed before because we're providing the primitives and the building blocks. I think the verifiability will come. It's just interesting. How's the traction been?

What's the rollout with the go-to-market? Go-to-market is handing out 500 business cards to everyone at Demo Day. You want every company here, all the small startups the the early stage companies that feels easier than ripping out some massive slack installation Right exactly. Okay. We take a lot of inspiration with Dan stay with Dan forever. Got it. Okay, but seat based pricing Yes, interesting Okay, so the one- company, you're cooked. Good luck though. You'll figure it out.

I'm sure it'll be fine. All right. Have you shared any numbers? What were you guys doing before this? I previously started a company when I was 19. I would go to like zero to five million ARR, 50 people. That's good.

Congratulations. Thank you. No, I started this three months ago now. So it's been awesome. Awesome, very cool. Three months right before I see it. Exactly. Yeah.

Justin, what were you doing? Yeah, I mean, Linus is a beast. He hired me actually at his previous stuff. So I was able to kind of go from like that 500, 1,000 ARR to 5 million. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we just loved working together. That's awesome.

This is what we wanted to spend the next 20 years on. Yeah. Amazing. Fantastic. Thanks so much for hopping on the stream. This was fantastic. Awesome. Good luck, guys. Thanks so much for hopping on the stream. This was fantastic. Good luck guys.

See you on the next one. And we are ready for our next guest coming on in to the Palace of Party Rounds to YC Demo Day 2025. Welcome to the stream. Eloquent. How are you doing? Nice to meet you. Very nice to meet you.

It's Tuche. Tuche. Hey, Jordan. Nice to meet you. Hi, I'm John. Pleasure. What's happening? I'm kicking this over. Would you mind starting with an introduction on yourselves

and the company you're building today? Absolutely. This is Tuche. I'm the CEO of Eloquent AI. And I'm Aldo. I'm the Chief AI Officer of Eloquent AI. Fantastic. And what are you building?

We are basically building an AI platform for financial services to automate complex regulated operations. Okay. What's an example of that? For example, in a bank, if you want to unfreeze an account or handle a reggae dispute, run KYC, KYB, this usually goes currently to support teams.

And you have a big queue, right? It might take up to two weeks to open a new business account. It happens all the time. So we solve that problem. Rather than that going to support team, it comes to our dedicated AI operator. Our AI operator takes on the job. And here is the real magic.

It basically navigates your existing core banking portal, just like your support team does. We don't need any APIs or any engineering. Exactly right. So this is coming from all those research for more than five years. They developed this technology that allows us to do computer use and browser use

in a reliable way for very specific tasks. How much of what you're doing is purely enabled by the advances at the foundation model labs versus fine tuning or any sort of scaffolding that you're doing on top of the state of the art models. That's a fantastic question. Do you want to tell a little bit? Yeah, of course, it's a little bit of both, right?

Foundation model, of course, gives us a lot of synthetic data on which we can train on. But we leverage a multi-agentic architecture to actually perform the actions reliably. What's the response been from big regulated financial institutions that are not traditionally the earliest adopters of new technologies, but everyone's talking about AI every day,

so I'm sure they're excited to at least talk to you. What's the response been like? You know, things have changed. We are finding it actually, we reached half a million ARR in four weeks. Congratulations. Love that. That too. That too.

And the reason is because I think all these banks now have the mandate to bring- Wait, did you say four and a half? Four and a half. It was four weeks. Half a million ARR in four weeks. There we go. All right, just do that every four weeks

for the rest of the year. Well, at this stage, we actually have a waiting list. We have more customers than we can onboard. Fantastic. Because as I was saying, things changed in the financial industry. They want to bring this cutting edge AI in-house as quickly as possible. That's amazing. Very cool.

How has YC been? Honestly, in any metric any metric it massively exceeded my expectations. I'm a second time founder so I thought okay do we really need to come to YC? You know we already have the investor networks but what was really beyond my expectations is the customer network especially in financial institutions is incredible. A lot of YC alumni are now running big fintech companies, banks, and they have been very welcoming. We can definitely feel the love. That's amazing. How big is the team? Where are you going next? I'm sure you're

raising money. What's happening down the road? What's in the next 12 months? Absolutely. So we raised a big seed round. We closed last week. Congratulations! Do I get another? We closed the seed round, everyone! I love the spirit here, that's amazing. That still surprises me every time. It does still surprise me, I love it. And yeah, we closed the seed round. Congratulations. At the moment, it's basically heads down.

We are building. We are six people. Aldo is leading our technical team. Fantastic. I do sales. Congratulations. And we are hiring 10 more people. 10 more people.

If anyone is watching who is looking for a new role, they are very welcome to contact us. Reshot. Reshot. That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. Thank you guys for coming on. It was very nice to meet you. Thank you. We'll see you soon much for stopping by. This was fantastic. Take care.

Let's bring in the next guests. We are live from YC demo day 2025. Book a wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Bring them on in. Come on in. Go to wander.com.

Hey guys. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? Good. Good to meet you. How you doing? Good to meet you. Why are you kicking us off with an introduction on yourselves and the company you're building? Sure. I'm Somi and I'm Achuth and we're building Ulearn.

It's an AI tutor for students. Very cool. What's the go-to-market? I tried to build an edtech company back in 2012. That was actually the first company I applied to YC for. It was a disaster. It was extremely hard. I never really made a dime off of it. I think I got like 500 installs on the iOS company I applied to YC for. It was a disaster, it was extremely hard. Never really made a dime off of it.

They got like 500 installs on the iOS app I built. Yeah, let's give it up for 500 installs. Not exactly one of these. How are you solving that? It's notoriously hard to sell into education. We're seeing a change, especially with AI. We have over 200,000 students active on our website. Wow, that's a thousand more than what I got during my Y our website. Wow. There we go.

A thousand more than what I got during my one-year-suggest. Thank you, thank you. You got something? You guys can keep talking. Okay. 200,000. We love it. Absolutely wild.

So what is the channel? Let me guess. You got a bunch of TikToks. Yep. Okay. There we go. TikToks, YouTube Shorts. We have, I think, over 500,000 followers on Instagram and TikTok. That's amazing yup. Okay, there we go. TikToks, TikToks, YouTube Shorts.

We have, I think, over 500,000 followers on Instagram. That's amazing. And how long did it take to build that up? We, it was a side project for a while, but I think eight months is, like, for the past few eight months. Okay, awesome. And how do you, I'm picturing kind of like

an LLM style chat interface, is that the wrong? Yeah, so essentially, like, students upload their, like, LLM style chat interface, is that the wrong? Yeah, so essentially, students upload their learning material, like textbooks, and we give them concise notes. You can have a conversation with an AI tutor as well. You can have quizzes. You can create exams. All the study tools. You create podcasts based on not just anything.

Yeah, so right now it's a conversational experience. We want to make it more proactive. So we have that. So you can listen. Yeah, I remember audio books were huge to me. And are you getting getting the point where teachers and schools are kind of asking their students to get on the platform and use it? Yeah so we're talking to a bunch of school districts and stuff but I think our main focus for now students we just want

to like get the product down for them and then move up. And what level are we talking? Middle school? Yeah where's doctrine been strongest? Yeah, so undergrads Like number one right now, and then it's higher than that and now we're seeing a lot of high schoolers as well How are you are you monetizing yet? Yeah? Yeah, so we have a free room subscription Okay, it's free for like a limited amount of time and then 20 bucks a month 20 Yeah, we give a discount an exam season. Right before exam season. We actually give $200. Yeah, we give a discount on exam season and it worked really well. It worked really well. It worked very well. Even post exam, there's always a summer sale this summer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really good.

I think it just works out really well. That's amazing. Wait, so how long have you actually been building this? I missed it. So we started eight months ago. Eight months ago, okay. And then YC. Okay, great. So have you been focusing on specific growth metrics during YC to kick off demo day? Um, yes. Just growing everything. So have you been focusing on specific growth metrics during YC to kick off demo day? Yes, just growing everything. Yeah, so MRR is like a key metric and then retention as well We want to make sure like like a key part in learning is like retaining Fantastic. Did you share an MRR number today? Yes. Can you share anything with us? Yes, we can Fantastic. Let's hear it. We are at

$75,000 Honestly, I gotta say sorry. Yeah, I know. $83,000. $83,000 would have been $1 million. You're close. That's amazing. Next week. Next week. Put another sale on. Go to every person in the back. Subscribe right now!

Let's get him to $1 million. We're not gonna let you leave until you get $2 million of your arse. Okay. You gotta stay in this room. Let's get him to one mill. Let's get him to one mill. That's fantastic. We're not going to let you leave until you get to a million of our. Okay. You got to stay in this room. Last question, obviously tons of developments from all the foundation model labs. What's working? What's most exciting?

What are you taking advantage of? Are you focused on cost optimization, looking for open source? Do you want to use the best? Are you a beneficiary of the 03 pricing drop? Are you a beneficiary of 03 Pro? 100%, every model improvement benefits us directly. Yeah, we want to focus on accuracy the most right now. We want to make sure everything that a student gets

is as accurate as possible. Are students cooked by AI? I wouldn't say so. Are you uncooking them? I think they're leveraging it more just to study smarter, and that's what our vision is. And also an interesting thing is they really like our voice mode.

So it's not just text-based. They can have a natural conversation. So is it like you leave it open on your desk when you're studying? Yeah, you can do that. Yeah, and it can create mind maps for you. It can create flow charts. You can create whatever you want.

That's very cool. How are you seeing the competition? Did you guys drop out? In the process. In the process. Legally, legally not yet. School for you, but not for me. How are you seeing the obvious competition between just

using ChatGBT, 20 bucks a month, that's right at the pro tier, like the plus tier? There's a lot of, Tyler Cowen's been writing about, I used to feed in a snippet from a book and ask Chachi Peep about it. Now I just say, hey, summarize this book and it already knows, so we can just go out and find it. That feels like the logical competitor, but how are you differentiating in terms of actual

UI design, because it seems like as we move to the application layer narrative, there is a world where aggregating demand around AI tools, around a specific niche works, but there's a lot of secret sauce that goes into the UI. What are you doing to stay ahead? So yes, definitely a UI is a big component, but the main thing is we just ask our users, why do they use us over Chagy Pt?

Sure, what's the answer? And they say, like we have a feature called the quizzes and the slash cards. And we create that very accurately for them. Interesting. And what they can do is they can upload a 1,000 page textbook, even 2,000 pages. Someone uploaded the entire video.

Imagine chat GPT hallucinates and you just fail your exam. I remember. I remember in college, I had a textbook and I wanted a digital version. I took, so I remember in college I had a textbook and I wanted a digital version. I took it to a scanning and they scanned it all and they were like, do you have the right to do this? This sounds illegal. I would try and download illegal PDFs.

It was very sketchy. How are college students uploading 2,000 page documents? Yeah, so if it's available digitally, they can upload it. Okay, like e-pop or anything mobile. Yeah, so I mean, they can upload anything they want, but it's on them. Okay, okay, yeah, they have to figure out that part of it. Okay, like an e-pop or anything mobile. Yeah, so I mean, they can upload anything they want, but it's on them. Okay, okay, yeah, they have to figure out that part of it. Okay, got it.

But eventually maybe you could do partnerships with publishers. Oh yeah, we wanna partner with like e-book companies and things like that. That'd be very, very cool. Yeah, yeah. Amazing. Well, congratulations. Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, congrats on all the progress.

We will see you later. And let's bring in the next team. Let's do it. Let's do a lightning round. Let's speed these up, right? Speed these up, there's demand. Speed these up up. There's demand is there demand out there. Okay. Hey, we only have two Only one of you or two of you can talk is that only so many mics Look at this army Tilt over a little bit go to the wide It's the founding team or you know the founding record yeah, who's a founding engineer?

What are you building? Break it down for us. So we are building AWS for AI agents. Imgine, we are 20 years ago, it was mostly infrastructure for software as a service. Now AI agents are becoming like the defacto new software. So we are building this infrastructure for the agents. What is important about infrastructure that needs to be different? Why wouldn't I not just deploy this infrastructure for the agents. What is important about infrastructure that needs to be different?

Why wouldn't I not just deploy this on AWS? Or Microsoft, I mean, you saw Satya Nidhala at Build, he was saying like, we have model router, we have everything from DeepSeat to Llama, to they vend every model, how are you going to stand out? Yeah, we stand out because today, first, people who are building agents are not cloud architects, cloud infrastructure experts.

So a new generation of software developers, software engineers. Second thing is agents are going to build themselves their infrastructure. So they need new interfaces to interact with the infrastructure. And the type of workload that they are using, like the technology they are using, the lifetime of the computing platform, is not the same. So serverless is one thing, traditional virtual machine is one of the same. Even going back to the YC story, Heroku.

Yeah, exactly. Was that story of like, yes, you could always spin up EC2, but Heroku made it easier. Exactly, and right now we are doing the same for agents. So when your agent is generating code, it needs to have access to some resources to run this code. So we provide these kind of resources called sandboxes to help them to run this code for 15 minutes,

an hour, or maybe months or years. How did you, when did you start the company? Did you start it three months ago when YC started or you guys have been at it for a little bit? Yeah, so actually we both, all worked in my previous company. We sold to a cloud provider, so we know how to do it. The trader's eight over here, and I laughed.

It's like Intel again. What happened? They couldn't retain any of you? You couldn't be bought. I see what happened. You couldn't be bought. Exactly, no, it's the six of us. That's amazing.

Congratulations. You guys stick together, I love it. How's adoption been? Who are you selling to? Who loves this product? Oh, it's the six of us. Or nothing. That's amazing. Congratulations. You guys stick together. I love it. I love it. How's adoption been? Who are you selling to? Who loves this product? So we launched seven weeks ago.

And like most of God's generation, companies from this batch, even in the next batch are starting using us. Really? Really, like paying customers in production right now. The economic model, I assume it's consumption based on top of the underlying cloud platforms that you're building on top of.

Is that correct? Yeah, exactly. We started actually to do something with a unique subscription, with monthly subscription, just to be sure that people were serious about using us, being sure that we get the right traction. Like, they are using actually in production our software. No, we want to expand, so we are basically

offering more just a usage-based model for the next batch. Do you guys live in the office? So we live, we sleep, when we can sleep, yeah, but we live in the office. Yeah, it's a lot of mouths to feed, have you raised money? Yeah. Rounds closed? Yeah, rounds closed, yeah, last week.

Congratulations! Thank you, thank you. Congratulations, yeah rounds close. Yeah Thank you Thank you I don't know why Spray them all with it Spray them all with it Fantastic well congratulations Thank you so much guys Thank you guys

Fantastic team look forward to following your journey Have a great time Thank you guys We got a good, have a great time. Thank you guys. We got a good name coming in next. We got waffle. Let's bring in waffle. Waffle. Come on in to the palace party round.

Oh yeah, they're customer. That's great. Waxo customer. Love it. Grab some seats, put the microphones as close to your face as you can because we are live from YCW 2025. You guys are building agents for agents.

We're building, yeah. What are you building? We're building an AI operating system for small to medium businesses. Okay. So what that means is we help you build your website, set up your business email address, your phone number, your bookings, your payments, all that kind of stuff. Are you guys replacing Google Workspace?

We're starting off replacing Wix. So we've just launched our AI website builder. Three weeks ago we've had 700 projects built on there. And yeah, people are building websites. Okay, so you build the websites and then you also are able to instantiate all the downstream stuff. But I imagine you're not rebuilding everything, so who are you plugging into?

Like you're not rebuilding Stripe, right? No, we're not rebuilding Stripe. It's like wrapping on top of these developer tools. Because there's so many of them now. There's so many and they're so cheap. Yes. Let's take just outbound email marketing. Someone could use something like Mailchimp.

Like Plainio, Mailchimp. There's a ton. Yeah, and that's much more expensive than how much me and Diogo pay when we set up a project with Resend because it's a developer tool. It's super cheap. Oh, interesting. So wrapping the lower level tools. And then we can make money on the spread.

Okay, interesting. How's adoption been? Adoption has been really interesting these first few weeks because we've done no marketing, we're just like full-time coding working on the product. So we've had people come in from the YC launch, from the Twitter, and now in the coming months what we're doing is like going in

and doing more go-to-market stuff. So one of the things we're doing is taking people's existing Wix or Squarespace website and just cloning it. Cloning it to waffle. And then just sending it to them. Sending it to them. Hey, we can do it. I've seen a lot of Wix and Squarespace.

You see the ads, the Super Bowl ads, and it's always a small business, a restaurant or a pub. And do you have a couple customer avatars that you really like or want to use to fuel your go-to-market? Yeah, right now I think what's really interesting is like these small family-run businesses, like these small family-run travel agents or law firms. I think long-term, e-commerce is really where it's at. They care a lot more about their website. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How important is design in that?

Are agents good at design yet? It doesn't seem like it's something that would come native yet. A lot of the AI art that's being produced is beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's interesting. The default clouds, like if you just ask Cloud to generate some UI, it's actually quite good, but it's very unopinionated.

Unopinionated. It's generic. Yeah. It's just like some generic type website. I think if you start giving examples and just really working the system from you can get it to a point which is pretty good. What we've been doing is using 21st dev. It's a tool to have a lot of UI and they're building out the magic chat which allows you to kind of take a UI components and like

have remixes of it. So they work on that specific technology and we're working with them. So yeah it's actually pretty good at UI but it's making stuff which is still quite generic and we're trying to push the boundary. What were you guys doing before this? Yeah so we've never worked full-time jobs. Yeah so we both did computer science, I was at Oxford you go was at Ecole Polytechnique Lausanne met up in London yeah I moved in with him and then we've just been working out there we got you yeah company in Europe and your testament to the fact that yeah come to America congratulations yeah it's been

insane I was listening to you guys two days ago. And when the Clueless founder was on and now it's important to get attention, but there is a limit. Where's the line for you? Clueless has their line around what they're willing to do for attention. It's pretty crazy. You know, it's willing to go that way.

I see goes the other end of the spectrum where they're like, just don't focus on your pitch Let the numbers speak for you Put your graph up and that's what matters. I think it's good. Did you have a number that you share today? Yeah, yeah, so we got 700 projects built in the last three weeks and then that's grown 14% over the last week Congratulations. We're gonna go with the rest of Dema day. We have one last hat here. There might be more out there There's more hats let's give them two hats Unless I tell you about linear linear app

Used to make my project at least half the batches. I think so welcome to the stream. How you doing? manager projects. I'm guessing at least half the batches. I think so. Welcome to the stream, how you doing? We're good. Nice to meet you. It's my hand in water, I'm gonna not shake your hand. Good to meet you.

Let's start with an introduction. Who are you guys, what are you guys building? And please, microphone as close to this as possible. Yeah, I'm Daniel. Cool. And this is Musa. Cool. And we're the co-founders of VibeGrade.

What do you guys do? So we help teachers save time grading papers directly in their existing learning management system. What's the response been like? Do the teachers love it? Yeah actually all of our customers are paying out of pocket. Really? Wow. You said in their LMS? Yes. So who are you plugging into? Who's the most dominant platform providers right now? So the main one and the best integration is on Google Classroom. Oh interesting. So a lot of people. Is Blackboard not a thing anymore? Not that much. We got a request for it but most teachers are on Google Classroom. Oh, interesting. So a lot of K-12. Is Blackboard not a thing anymore? Not that much.

There's some teachers. We got a request for it, but most teachers are on Google Docs and Canvas. So most K-12, which we serve, are on Google Docs in the classroom. We have Tottle as well, but it's mainly those few. Makes sense. Yeah, but for universities, Canvas is great.

It'll go and highlight actual sections. So can you add that on as one of those? If if I'm in Google Docs I can do it. Yeah it's a Chrome extension. It's a Chrome extension. Okay. So we realized that teachers they don't have to learn a new tool and go to a new platform to do that. So we built an integration that works directly with Google Docs and directly with Canvas. So it's easy as clicking a button and we open up a window inside Google Docs. Yeah so walk me through the typical like workflow homework. Yeah, the student uses

Write the questions. Yeah, the student uses chat. You meet me And then the teacher goes back and you guys great you guys great it. Yeah, but what's the actual workflow? Our students sending Google Docs links to their teachers when they're done? So Daniel was just in high school, so he really knows how this works. Oh, OK. Are you in a high school dropout?

You dropped out of high school. Get the bottle of wine. Get the bottle. No, we're not going to. Congratulations. Yeah. High school dropout. So the word full of Chad.

Yeah. You front ran everybody. Everybody that was like coming into demo day, or dropped out of college. It's like, that's how it played out. You had to one up. You had to go farther. Yeah, I mean, like selling.

I think we heard about you earlier. You're selling it back to your teachers now? Like, at the school you dropped out of? Sort of. I mean, they don't really like me that much. No? Yeah. Like, on my final exam, well, I mean, I skipped finals

to go fly to. We went to this edtech conference in Orlando So I guess they don't really like me because of that But we had to bring it to more teachers like you when you're the commencement speaker in a couple years Yeah, hopefully so the workflow is where teachers usually the students submit in Google classroom or like canvas Yep They submit a Google Doc or a PDF and then then the teacher opens it up, the doc, and they grade it within by highlighting certain sections, adding comments, a summary of the feedback.

So we do the whole process right in the Google Doc, and then we have the teacher review everything. They can speak to our system to understand their tone and their style, so then we add those comments in. How is the actual testing and grading and homework process changing? Because I imagine that the solution to chat GBT homework

is probably everyone's on a laptop typing the answers in the classroom, and there's a monitor watching that you're not just AI-ing it. And then it can be AI graded, and then that's a win for everyone. Is that roughly what's happening? Yeah. The thing that we've seen is people say all the time,

students are writing with chat GPT, teachers are gonna grade with AI. What's the whole point? Well, the objective of the student is to learn. And if you're just using chat GPT and mindlessly submitting something, well then you're not doing the right thing. There's always gonna be a way to get around it

if you really don't wanna learn. But for teachers, the main objective is to give students the best feedback and instruction Yeah So what we're doing is just enabling them to do that a lot better because even in school when like our teachers would give us Just like generic copy paste feedback. Yeah, so we just want to give students the best feedback possible Okay gives teachers their time back and they really get the value because they're the ones experiencing the benefits Yeah, talk to me about the top of funnel.

Why would you not at one point just give the tool to students as well? Yeah. 100%. That's actually what we're working on next. So we just signed three contracts with schools last week. Okay. Congratulations. And they want to be able to give this tool to students so that while they're writing, they're going to get real-time feedback on their Google Doc as if the teacher were adding comments in real-time. So it's sort of like, you submit a rough draft to your teacher, they have to grade it,

and then give it back to you, and then you can do a final draft. Instead of that, why not just have the assistant give you feedback in real-time on the doc? Yeah, that's great. Talk to me about the top-of-funnel. How are you telling teachers that this works? I imagine at the price point you can't do

hand-to-hand combat sales. How are you getting in front of teachers these days? So, we have 100 teachers that are paying completely out of pocket, and all of that has been organic through either the Chrome Web Store, so they find us when they install another extension like Grammarly, and then they tell their friends about it.

So word about mouth has been really strong. We got 600,000 views on Instagram and Facebook in the past 30 days. There we go. We just started posting memes and things like that. And teachers really, they share it. And then they look at our page. And so they find us there.

That's great. So that's the top of funnel up until this point. And we're going to start pumping out more UGC style content. We're actually going to the biggest ed tech conference in the US. Let's go. At the end of this month. The Super Bowl of ed tech. Yeah.

We have 20,000 teachers there and we've got a really big, we bought a 400 square foot booth there and we're going all out for trying to reach as many teachers as possible. Congratulations. How do you guys make your first money on the internet? How do we first make like I used to make websites for like random people. I charged like this pastor in New Jersey like three thousand dollars to make

his church a website. That was back when I was maybe 16. I made like a mental health chat app in like grade 10. And like a couple of people like one person in Japan found it and they installed it and paid for it. They paid for it. Let's go.

That's amazing. Congratulations. Have a great day. You're gonna show us your land. Great to meet you. Thank you. Appreciate it. High school's cooked.

Excited. Call us when you meet the first, yeah we're good. We got middle school dropouts next. The next middle school dropout. That's how I was going with that. Welcome to the stream. We are live from YC Demo Day 2025. Good to meet you.

I'm John. Nice to meet you. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? Good to Demo Day 2025. Good to meet you. I'm John, nice to meet you. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? We're gonna have you sit down here. We're gonna have you pull this microphone as close as you can, talk directly into it, introduce your company. What do you do? We are building AI agents for insurance claims operations.

Okay, how's that going? Are you, is business ripping? Yeah, we're at 200K AR now. Let's go. Let's go. Go where the money is. That's why people rob banks. Let's go where the money is. That's why people rob banks because that's where the money is. That's right. Go to the insurance industry. It's expensive. Who are you selling to? I assume that the insurance industry is very oligopolistic. There's a few big players, but is that not right? We're selling to third

party administrators, which are these like claims outsourcing companies of which there is a surprising number of, yeah, it's like 42,000 across Europe and did you realize that you guys loved insurance no I'd seen it in my job before like it sort of had some exposure my roommate is an insurance adjuster so it's like look over his shoulder I'm gonna put you out of jobs. We can hang out and get more movies on the weekends. I like you're working late. I want to play video games with you. That's the best.

Awesome. So yeah, walk me through what you're actually building, what the product experience is like, how it plugs in. I assume this is some sort of like copilot experience right now, or is it fully agentic? It's a fully agentic experience. So the goal is to replace like autonomously parts of the workflow for the adjuster.

So the thing we're live with with our customers is like a claim intake agent. So when you crash your car and you call in, you basically ask you a set of structured questions and then create structured data and writes it into the system of record. Got it, okay. And previously that was handled with someone on the phone

talking and typing everything in. My roommate. Your roommate? Yeah, there you go. Did you get him as a customer yet? No, not yet. He works for a very big carrier, so that's gonna be a lot of stuff.

Playing the long game with that one. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. And what were you doing before? I was doing product consulting and then worked as a software engineer at Agentive, which is another YC startup. Oh, very cool. How's the round coming together?

What's it looking like? Closed in yesterday. Closed in yesterday! Closed in yesterday. Congratulations. Well, thank you so much for hopping on. Good luck. Thanks, Zach. Good luck with everything. We are. Congratulations.

We're moving into lightning rounds. I'm going to give you one of these. Let's bring in the next team. We're moving through these quicker. Thank you so much for hopping on. We are live from YC Dema Day 2025. Welcome to the stream. Come on, sit down.

What do we got? Text AI. Text AI. That's a good domain. Are we supposed to suit up for this? No, you can do whatever you want. We don't have the right gear. Pleasure, pleasure, pleasure.

Pleasure. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. How you doing? Sorry, we don't have an extra chair. Yeah, I briefly caught like 30 seconds of your two minute pitch up there. Give it to us again.

What's the pitch today? Yeah, we're AI agent right in your group chats. Okay, in the group chats. Yes, sir. How are you plugging in? Because I feel like iMessage, they really don't like when other companies plug in. 100%, we're carrier based.

As long as you have a number that you can just add to a group chat instantly, right then and there. Are you a beneficiary of the RCS update? Yes, we are. Explain how. Yeah, we're working through the RCS update? Yes, we are. Explain how. Yeah, we're working through a couple of providers that give us a number.

So we're all working with all the carriers, like Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T. And then we're applying for the RCS. It's still in the beta stages, even though it's rolled out. But SMS infrastructure is one of the best infrastructure in the world, so that's working. Whoa, hot take. I feel like everyone's annoyed by it.

That's why Twilio exists. But is it good now? It feel like it was terrible for a long time No, I feel like the big question around adding an AI to your group chat is security security things that happen and yeah Yeah, single group chats. You don't you want to be very careful about who you are? Yeah, no great question guys It's we don't sell your data look you can kick out the AI whenever you don't want it. You bring it in, bring it out.

Nothing compared to like Metai, where it's always living in there ambiently. It's completely under your control. So we don't sell any of that data either. What's the most obvious use case? The family group chat creating a grocery list or something? Give me some examples of how people are using this. It's actually a lot of friends using this

to get a restaurant recommendation, roasting each other. When do we need to actually all meet up, have reminders in there, that's our first agentic flow. Yeah, and when you're planning trips and trying to go out, there's always that one person that's like, no, I'm too busy or this doesn't work for me and someone has to put in the screenshot, someone's always taking the lead.

Simplified it. It's like the idea of adding agents to group things. It feels like, I saw this meme that was like, I joined a Zoom call and it was seven AI agents. Do you see this one? Everyone see this. Yeah, everyone sees this. And it was like the one poor girl

and then like this person's no taker and fireflies and Lou and this one and this one, this one. Yeah, how are you thinking about building the agents yourselves versus letting people build on top of TextAI? I think two things. Number one, it's like the quality control that has to come in along the things like you said on the data piece. We're a consumer company. We're like Text.AI. People are interacting with us. You want to be very careful of allowing third parties to come in here and see what they do with the data. That's prevalent. And second is

like we build it ourselves so we can really figure out specific use cases like calendaring, for example, working with other people's calendars, giving you an exact answer like, hey between all five of us, when's the best time where we can actually grab coffee later this evening? And it can actually find it,

done and dusted right then and there. How much of the go-to-market is just pure viral growth because someone gets added, you realize that it's text AI and you add it to the next group chat and it just kind of goes from there. Can you add a Studio Ghibli machine to the group chat? That is a great question.

We have Ghibli images working. I wish I could put it on live stream right now, but we actually have collaborative AI where we can actually start doing images. That's very cool. People can edit it together. I mean, that was the beauty of mid-journey is that they use Discord, right?

And then so if Jordy writes a great prompt, I can kind of spin off that, make sense that would happen in iMessage and never else. There's so many fun, and I'm already thinking like, anytime somebody shares any photo, just immediately make it like a Star Trooper version of that. That's like half of our group chat. Just me sending gibblies of all the other guys in the chat.

It's like, great. Isn't it exhausting that everyone like cuts and pastes? Yeah, yeah, you go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Make it so that everyone is accessing it equally. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the beauty is, you can create an image, beauty is you can create an image he can edit it Yeah, and someone else can edit it on top of yes, so much more clever

There is no need to really copy paste images Yeah, just the best part of being consumer. Yeah, is that you get to put this out there and you're gonna see what people do it Hinge dates. No one goes in brings them into a text thread says hey by the way I have my AI staff here. Do you have any restrictions? Do you have any favorite restaurants? Oh interesting. This is well above beyond use cases you can have imagined. Yeah yeah yeah. It's going to places where people are being really thoughtful about how do you bring it in to make it more easy for us to have a human connection. What were you guys doing before this? So I was at Tesla for four years leading there. Can you explain what Tesla is?

No idea. Your guess is best as mine. Now I was leading the digital supercharging team there and the vehicle subscriptions team. That's great. And then, Prahar. Yeah, I was leading an engineering team at Walmart. And then before that I used to do.

Let's give it up for Big Retail. Can you explain what that is? I wonder what Walmart is. I was leading an engineering team at Walmart. I wonder what Walmart is. But before that I was at a Ben Bright and OpenTable doing a lot of consumer personalization. So that's why I think one of the main reasons we founded Techs.AI was our rich consumer background. I've had a blast of being in media for a long time. Most recently, I was the CEO of a B2B media company down in Los Angeles. We exited, I sold it over in October. Cool, congrats.

I've known these guys for eight years. Yeah, yeah, nice. Rishi's first job was at a crypto startup my wife was at. No way. She hired him and then he wouldn't leave our house. He just showed up. And so I've seen him do everything. And then Prahar, of course,

these guys went to school together And so the opportunity after going in and doing a lot of executive jobs that like publicly traded companies or not I think if you want to know what's happening, you got to get hands on keyboard Yeah, there's no talk the executive talk and pretend like you understand it You got to get back on and so for me This was a great opportunity to go work with these two guys and start from scratch and just get to know what's happening because this is going to be the platform for the next 15 years. That's amazing.

Well, congrats. Thank you very much. Quick question. How's the watch game at and your guys' batches? I see you guys each the Texas time. He has a better guess. He's leading the way. My last time, I might be the oldest founder ever to go through YC.

And so yeah. What are you like 32? Yes, yes, yes. I'm gonna stay with that. I'm gonna go from 50 then I am to 32. Okay, cool. Pleasure, pleasure. Thank you.

We'll see you soon. Bye. Up next, we have another team coming into the studio. Welcome. Good to see you. Come on. Welcome to YC Demo Day. I see two sweatshirts. Hold up, hold the mic up

What is that? Preliminary You just assume that they're blowing out their metrics I just assume that you're crushing them Good to meet you Can kick us off with an introduction on you and the company that you're building today Hey guys we're building ValuMate We're automating real estate appraisals

Okay How did you realize you wanted toating real estate appraisals with AI. How did you realize you wanted to evaluate real estate appraisals? Yeah, so a little bit, you know, family background, like things of the sort. We kind of discovered this pinpoint. We both study AI at CMU. We have families that have background in it, and, you know, seeing appraisals and things of the sort, super inefficient process, and we were like, it's one of those industries just perfect, like just ready, you know, to be a lot more efficient.

And that's kind of how we got into the space. What is the structure of the legacy market today? You guys are providing a tool for people that do appraising. Yeah, exactly. So like the current competition has literally existed for 40 years right and it's just like like appraisal reports is like a snapshot of like a property. A human goes in and looks at things, takes some pictures and writes down a lot of quality of the trim and floorboards and mold. So we bring this entire thing down and just a scan. Okay. Right so you scan it we build a 3d model

to floor plan a computer vision takes notes sure and then we pull data from all these various sources. Got it. And then we use the eye, obviously, to fill out this kind of report. So it's a pretty time consuming process that we're able to bring down. Is it a partnership with Zillow to do a better estimate or truly augmentation copilot for the existing

true appraisal reports that are used in underwriting? For the true appraisal reports that are used in underwriting. For the true appraisal reports that are used in underwriting. Because the issue with Zillow, and every appraiser will kind of tell you this, this is super inaccurate. Like, people are like, ah, what's this meant? Yeah, it's mostly based on recent sales in the area. It's not actually the quality of the building.

Exactly, right? So what we're able to do is- Doesn't even take into account remodels. Exactly. Because they don't know. They don't know, they don't have the building. Exactly. Right. So what we're able to do is even take into account remodels. Exactly. Because they don't know. Right. They don't know. They don't have the data. And what we're able to do is have this digital twin of a property. So it's actually along the way as we're, you know, we're building this and selling, you know, software Anybody's gonna kind of have to put future my act is super accurate Before this we were students at Carnegie Mellon University we dropped out Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry there's a couple guys drop out of high school Talk to us about traction. How are things going? Do we going super well? We started selling 20 days ago And we're at a hundred and twenty four thousand dollars in

Congratulations, you were correct You guys get the round down already we are we are still filling out around Okay, they stage talks with some with some leads luck, but it's looking like we're gonna You when did you first discover YC? Oh, yeah, it's good questions cover YC So my freshman year roommate from Carnegie Mellon was actually YCF 24 Oh, there you go, and I told you about it in my mind since then I was like, okay I have to do this. Okay, you got and then you know, we did it You're in the league now in the league playing the welcome to the league. Welcome to Silicon Valley You about it in my mind since then I was like, okay, I have to do this You got it got it and then you know, we did it so welcome

You're in the league now in the league playing the ball comes in league. Welcome to Silicon Valley. Yeah, and welcome to demo day Thank you for stopping by. Thank you. Talk to you. It's good to be let's bring in the next crew Thank you so much. We got a line. We got a line out the door. We're gonna bang through these we got these guys got Bloom bloom. Are you building Bloom filters? No, no, no. What are you? So the easiest way to do it is to say, no. No?

OK, break it down. No, so lovable, but for native mobile apps. OK, cool. It's the easiest way to do it. Oh, interesting. Interesting. We'd love to just show you. Please, please, please.

OK, so have you guys tried to build mobile apps before? Three touches. What is that? I've never seen that interaction before. He's got a UI from the future. So have you guys ever tried to build mobile apps? Yes, yes. I wrote Objective-C. It was terrible.

I even wrote Xcode. It was awful. No, Xcode sucks. I need to go to Xcode all the time. I love Apple, but we're very excited about the anthropic partnership. Yeah, so typically you'll have to write code. You'll have to build the app in Xcode or something.

You'll have to submit for apps to review. You'll have to get your users to download it in Testlight, enter an invite code. OK, so with us, I can literally just talk into my phone, build a native app, and then I can send it to you via literally bumping phones. Oh, interesting. Do you have an iPhone?

Yeah, I do. I do. Wow. Let's see this. OK. You can just load the app right onto the home screen. OK. Malware installed.

All personal information extracted The turn on again no, oh no live demos, yeah airdrop like maybe we need another are you on the same Wi-Fi? Let's see airdrop airdrop is on Oh contacts only yeah Okay, I got it. Okay. Cool. Let's try it out.rop is on. Oh, Contacts only. Now it's on everyone. Okay, I got it. Let's try it now. There we go. Skill issue. Skill issue. Okay.

Is it going? I got the wave. You saw the wave, right? Yeah. I only have ramp, public, adquick, eight sleep, wander, and puzzle installed right now. Those are the only apps I have. Let's give it one more shot. Otherwise, we'll have to give it one more shot. I couldn't take it.

Otherwise we'll have to maybe try on your phone. Yeah, it's okay. It's not like this is live or anything. Okay, you try. We'll give it a shot. Anyways, keep well worth. So when someone tries to build an app with Bloom, right?

It's doing the wave, but it's not doing that. I don't know. I think it's the internet. The internet just sucks. Let's doing the wave, but it's not doing that. I think it's the internet. The internet just sucks. Yeah, yeah. Let's play on the internet. Anyway, so what you would see is you'd be able to open this app on your phones like instantly, right? And it uses App Clips under the hood. Oh yeah, okay.

So that's how you're getting the app off without me actually installing the full app. Exactly, exactly. And then- Oh, so you're really hacking the app clips thing. That's awesome. Exactly, exactly. And so the other thing is like when you're prone to build an app with us, we also automatically deploy a backend for you. Yeah.

Real-time syncs between devices. As I understand app clips, it's like, it's like there's like one app, like the Uber app exists, and then there's an app clip that ties to Uber. Are you creating like custom app clips? It's all, it's all around one IO app. Oh wow. It's one Bloom app clip that then loads apps from anyone.

So it's like an app store within an app store. Yeah, kind of. Kind of thing like that. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. We don't want to say that. We don't want to say that. We've talked on our show before about this idea of like ephemeral apps, like apps as like memes.

Exactly, exactly. There's a lot of things that should exist but only for like a day. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we've had so many ideas for like funny apps, but we don't want to actually go pay, you know, find someone to do this. Exactly, oh, it used to be there's so many people, people have an idea for an app and you're like, well, you realize it'll cost like a million dollars to build that.

Exactly. It's not actually valid. Exactly. With us, we built an app for demo day in five minutes that everyone in the audience could just scan to vote on our evaluation in five years. And it had a graph that updated in real time for everyone because it has a backend connection tool. And so what we want to enable is a creator economy but for software.

Okay, under the hood, what are the best code generation LLMs that you're using? What do you like? What's exciting and how is that market developing? Yeah, so I mean right now we're obviously for the smartest models we're using Claude for Sonnets. Claude 4. But we're also experimenting with a smart mode and a fast mode. Because sometimes people just want to make a quick edit to their app.

And literally you can just speak into our phones, right? You just go into this edit mode and then you can just type, hey, add this feature or whatever. And so sometimes you just want those changes fast. And what's cool is if you had this app open, it would also hot reload on your device. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very, very cool. What use cases are you most excited about? What are you seeing? What categories, broadly?

Yeah, I mean, so right now, we're seeing people that already think as software as a creative outlet use this. So developers, designers, and entrepreneurs. So especially for designers and non-technical entrepreneurs, it's great because they can just like, their creativity gets unlocked with this. And so we're seeing people build all kinds of things, like personal apps, but also apps

that I wouldn't have imagined before, like someone in Africa building a wildlife tracking app for their conservation. And then people building funny apps for weddings. To find the most delicious animals to go after? Oh, cotton candy, I think. To conserve animals for my own hunting, for my next hunting expedition.

I'm kidding. But yeah, what I'm really excited about is the apps that I can't even imagine, right? Yeah, of course. Of course. When the YouTube founders put out YouTube, I'm sure they weren't imagining vlogging. They didn't imagine MrBeast or MKBHD.

Exactly. You put out images in ChatGP. They didn't really imagine StudioDoll and the gigly happening. And for us, I mean, it's software. So you can literally do anything. Congratulations. Thank you so much How's your round going? Oh

Breathing in the micropods. Oh, yeah, it's really this is violating everything I know about you. Put your life on the line. How's it going? Hey, what's happening? Hi, nice to meet you, I'm John. How are you guys? Pleasure. Hi. Hey, how are you?

Before we, I don't have long hair. Yeah, no worries, no worries. Can you introduce yourselves? What are you building? Sure, so we're Morpho AI, we're building a software tool for engineers that are building new robots and new machines. Oh, interesting.

Yeah, so I came from the manufacturing tech world. Okay. We both met at Harvard, I was an MBA. He was a postdoc and you know you should talk about yourself too. Yeah absolutely and yeah I met everyone at Harvard like she said we got an introduction from a mutual mentor. I did my PhD at MIT focused on automating the design of robots so it seemed like you know wanted to bring that into some sort of product, show people in the world how useful it was and how it could change the way people design. And she was super excited about changing all the pain points in manufacturing. So we're doing this. What is exciting in

terms of robotics in manufacturing? There's a lot of noise about humanoids but we talked to a lot of people who are just saying... Is it robotics in manufacturing or is it a tool to accelerate the manufacturing of robots? Second one. But the main app, Beachhead Market is really in industrial robots. Okay. So. So the crazy stuff that we found is, you know, if you're actually buying a robot off the shelf, you can't actually just like put it in the factory floor, like 90 plus percent go through a customization process. That's like six months of lead time and you know, it takes up a lot of engineering hours. So one of our customers, they were trying to build a full new industrial robot arm sure six months gone in you know arms

Not lifting they came to us and in two days We basically redid their entire hardware design interesting so quite literally we're allowing engineers to build new robots overnight Is the hope and in the future in a matter of minutes? How how concentrated is the robotic arm market or there's a few companies that you really need to integrate with deeply or do you? Need to create something more generalizable out of the gate there's just a few companies that you really need to integrate with deeply or do you need to create something more generalizable out of the gate? So we're starting out with a little bit more of the OEM side of things, but also these integrators that are buying these arms and saying,

I now need a new hand. So out of like the what? 50,000 robots that get deployed in a given year, most of them have a new hand that's made. And so now you have a generalist engineer trying to make a new hand for four to six weeks in a new design. So really plugging in and that early stage of what do I build before we even get to the programming part? Yeah, the whole idea is you just have to input the test specifications that you needed to solve. And then as much as possible, we're automating of the mechanical and somewhat the control design side of things.

Is there is there a lot of data that you need to feed in? Is there a lot of data that you need to pull from the manufacturer before you can? We work with parts that manufacturers have and that they like to feed in? Is there a lot of data that you need to pull from the manufacturer before you can... We work with parts that manufacturers have and that they like to work with. And aside from that, it's task specifications, but we, unlike a lot of the Gen. AI companies out there, we do employ some Gen. AI solutions, but they're all trained from simulation and not from data sets. And that's really important because the data for how do you go from design to how well it's going to work, that doesn't really exist. Nobody takes logs and creates data sets

of things they've built and how well they worked. Sure, sure, sure. Talk about traction. Sounds like you guys already are in market. Yeah, so we actually just got a grant from the UK government, two and a half million British pounds the last couple of months ago. Oh, fantastic.

Non-deluded? Fully non-deluded. Congratulations, we love it for that. Jordi, Jordi. Oh my god, my ears. It's gonna happen. Hey, non-deluded. Congratulations, we love it for that. Jordan! Hey! Non-deluded. I didn't hear them out there. I mean Europe just shooting themselves in the foot.

Not getting them a cap table. They're gonna be like, why didn't we get that? At least a quarter point or something. Anyway, congratulations. Thank you. None of us are British, but they basically have the switch of friends. We're setting up an office in London. Like, we're really excited about working with them

and setting up an office there. Yeah, of course. Of course there's benefits to the research community. Absolutely. We have a lot of collaborators there as well. It's fantastic. That's good. It'll be an amazing outcome for them.

Last thing, bull bear on humanoids. Yes, humanoids. What's your take? I'm bear, but I'm like medium bear. I don't know, it was like, okay, if you're gonna build a humanoid, which humanoid? Like people come in all sorts of sizes and shapes. A construction worker is not the same as like a toddler

or something like that. Not toddler, but like ballerina, exactly. Linebacker looks different than a sprinter. So you're gonna need custom designs regardless of what you do. But I mean, the other side of things is just like, what is the application right now of the humanoids that isn't solved better by re-engineering the things around the humanoid. And that's

there's a long tail there. So we hope we can help people to design the humanoids of the future. Just don't think it's here yet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there's an embarrassing 100 year timeline. Or even maybe a 10 year timeline. I completely agree. Very reasonable stance. 100 years Anyway, let's bring in the next team. We're putting the word out Millions of dollars. Yes's going to be a lot of money. I'm pretty sure that's going to happen. I'm pretty sure that's going to happen. I'm pretty sure that's going to happen. I'm pretty sure that's going to happen.

I'm pretty sure that's going to happen. I'm pretty sure that's going to happen. I'm pretty sure that's going to happen. I'm pretty sure that's going to happen. I'm pretty sure that's going to happen. I'm pretty sure that's going to happen. I'm pretty sure that's going to happen. I'm pretty sure that's going to happen.

I'm pretty sure that's going to happen. I'm pretty sure that's going to happen. I'm pretty sure that's going to happen. I'm pretty sure that's going to happen. I'm pretty sure that's going to happen. I'm pretty sure that's going to happen. I'm pretty sure that's going to happen. I'm pretty sure that's going to happen.

I'm pretty sure that's going to happen. I'm pretty sure that's going to happen. I'm pretty sure that's going to happen. I'm pretty sure that's going to happen. I'm pretty sure that's going to happen. I'm pretty sure that we're Prism. Prism is an agentic observability company. So we let developers configure agents to watch their production systems. So read logs for them, watch videos of their customers using software, and then enable them to take certain actions. So like create issues on Linear, GitHub. There we go.

Sponsor the stream, let's hear from Linear. Yeah, I did that on purpose. And send reports to Slack. That's great, that's great. Well, how's adoption been? How are you selling in? Are you going medium-sized scale-ups, other startups, YC companies, enterprise? What are you thinking? Bottom up. So this is a tool that every developer needs and every developer can

use. So we're starting with the YC community. Cool. We're completely self served. So there's 23 people on the platform and counting. Yeah. More people sign up and start using it every time. Were you guys iterating through the batch process? Oh, yeah, yeah, we were. So the first version of the product, so it's like we watch videos of people using software, right? So the first version of the product

was these two watching everyone's videos and just giving them issues and sending them Slack messages and stuff, like, guys, this is broken. You need to fix this. So we were basically like a services business, but we didn't tell everyone. We told them it was AI. And it was just these two.

So that was the first version of the business. Got to start somewhere. That's awesome. How's fundraising going? You guys in the midst of it? It's going great. We're in the midst of it. Still trying to finish up the round.

Yeah. Good luck. Yeah, we're excited. That's fantastic. Awesome. What were you doing before? I was at Greptile, which is a code review company. Oh, yeah.

I think you guys have a crazy website. Yeah, that's right. We love their website. The Cloud of Dragon with Eating the code review company. Oh, yeah You too I was a software engineer at pound two. Oh cool and I worked in product at Johnson Johnson. Oh, very cool Big Pharma Landon I met in high school and then all three of us were I Jordan sex together. Oh cool I like a post on LinkedIn this morning about how he left 850k a year behind at Palantir There we go. Oh, I think y'all make it all back Just burn the boats anyway good luck with the rest We are ready for the next guest on the YC demo day street Tyler's and crushes left 10 minutes left and then we gotta go

Yeah, we can speed through this as much as we can. We got 10 minutes until we gotta go to the airport. Is that right? We got 10 minutes more. Come on in. Don't even bother introducing yourself. Just tell us what you do. What company are you building? We are Clarm. We are perplexity on internal documents. So search is being heavily destructed by AI at the moment as you know Google is being disrupted by perplexity and we're doing that for internal enterprise search. Okay Competition with clean they just raised a bunch of money. How are you thinking? I'm gonna replace them. You're gonna replace Replacing Google replacing clean. Okay. Okay. So how say we're replacing Google, we're replacing Glean.

Okay, okay. So how do you do it? What's different? How do you actually integrate? Are you building a bunch of integrations? Are you building on top of an integrator? We have our own integrations. We found that the only way to do this, to actually build AI-agentic search, is to build it from the ground up.

And that's why all these legacy players have to do that as well. What's more important, integration with Google Docs, for example, or integration with the data lake that maybe somebody has a snowflake installation? What's more important? I mean, it's important to have both of them so that you can connect them together.

So you integrate both and then you connect them together. We have about 45 connectors. 45 connections, okay. How about customers? How many of those you got? We have eight. We only launched two weeks ago. Congratulations, congratulations. What's how about customers? How many of those you got? We have eight. We only launched two weeks ago. Congratulations. What's the biggest

challenge? Is permissioning hard? Maybe at smaller companies it's not as much of an issue but as you go kind of up market? It's dealing with all the different types of data and this is why BTC companies don't play in enterprise space because when you have to look at Salesforce data alongside Messiac sell sheets then it becomes harder to connect them together but that's the value in it. Where can companies go to get started? They can go to Climb.com they can try our live demo now. You own the 5 letter domain already? Congratulations on demo day. They can talk to us directly. Fantastic JLC Reverso. Thank you very much. It's a fantastic watch. We'll see you soon. Thanks so much for hopping on. Let's bring in the very much. It's a fantastic watch. Well guys, awesome.

Congratulations. Thanks so much for hopping on. Cheers. Let's bring in the next team. We're doing lightning round, lightning round, lightning round, lightning round at YC Demo Day 2025. Welcome to the street. What do you do?

What are you building? AI co-pilot for solo printers. Perfect. Wow, exactly. Okay, get out of here. Good job. How's it going? How many customers do you have?

What data are you sharing today at YC Demo Day? Who's it going? How many customers do you have? What data are you sharing today? Who's more cracked? He's definitely the most cracked engineer we have ever seen. He's the most cracked engineer? So we've gone from 0 to 300k ARR in just 9 weeks. Congratulations! So that's what we're doing. And we're seeing the future where solopreneurs are going to completely wipe coat and run their entire business on cactus

So yeah, that's what we're building. Okay. Great name. Thank you. What were you guys doing before this? We built a previous wifey company. He was a founding engineer. We scaled it up to 2.5 The crack engineer and together Crack sales guy. How are you actually selling this thing? Is it hand to hand combat with these solopreneurs or are you doing like viral marketing? We've seen levels get a lot of attention for solopreneur stuff. How are you actually attracting people? Absolutely.

So it's mainly through word of mouth that's been spreading. What we also do is outbound where we call them. So think about caterer, a private chef, they're busy cooking all day long, call them. They don't pick up as expected, they're busy. We leave them a message saying, hey, you just missed an opportunity, guys. So yeah, they get back and then they set up cacti as they get incremental 10 to 15K in a month revenue.

And the biggest thing is the headache for them is gone, right, they don't have to answer the phone. That's the best thing. That's amazing. 300K ARR, how's the fundraise going? It's going great. We just got completely oversubscribed. Oh, exactly.

We'll congratulate you. Thank you. Thanks for coming on the stream. We'll bring in the next team. Have a great rest of your demo day. Come on down. We're live from YC Demo Day 2025. And we have our next team in the building.

Hello. Nice to meet you. I'm John. Nice to meet you, Ashani. Hello. Nice to meet you, I'm John. Nice to meet you, Ashani. Welcome. Good to meet you guys. Hi, would you mind introducing your company? What are you building?

Yeah, for sure. So we are building Lumari, which is essentially helping go-to-market teams build tools internally instead of having to buy super expensive SaaS. What tools do go-to-market teams need? Like, it could be anything from- Like golf clubs?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, clubs like golf club buying subscription and stick dinner booking that would be nice I wish we did that but we are helping them like from anything from deal scoring qualifying leads making contracts like anything down like the sales pipeline got it got it okay what what is the future of the stack look like are you guys gonna basically are you trying to verticalize effectively and allow people to build custom software at every point? At every point, yeah.

I really think we're going to look back to this era of SaaS, of having all these generic tools that you're using, and think that was really silly, because why wouldn't you have software that's custom built for your company, for your process? And so I think exactly that. We're going to start with replacing some of these really point solution software, but I think in the future,

every company's gonna have their own CRM. What were you guys doing before this? What were we? What were you doing before this? Oh yeah, I was at Stripe, Sam was at Google. Amazing. Yeah, we were-

Sort of a non-traditional background. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Who's the key person actually using the tools? Is this for a non-technical person? It's a non-technical person within these go-to-market teams often like a revenue operation sales operations that makes it's innocent how's traction it's been great we're at 90k ARR and see we're out of confetti yes

Pretty much. Yeah, we got we got a couple Let's bring in the next team we have five more minutes right something like that. Let's go five more minutes His voice let's go. I'm losing my voice. Welcome. Welcome to the stream I'm yo of and this is Shuria. Okay. We're second time exited YC founders. Let's go. Second time exited YC. Thank you.

Addicted to startups. Addicted to startups. We're building third chair. Okay. It's agents for in-house legal teams, and we're starting with media and entertainment companies. Oh, interesting. Very niche down, not just like legal AI,

but you've actually found a real. Wait, let me ask. Do you want to dominate a small market? No, it's a massive market. Oh, it is. It is. OK. But we're starting by dominating media and entertainment.

Sure. Yes. We're starting by helping media and entertainment companies find IP infringements. Oh, interesting. And we collect evidence around it. And then that's revenue driving immediately, right? Exactly.

It's a revenue generating workflow. Is that the business model? You take a cut of whatever you get? Or is it more seat based? We have a software model. We also take a cut of what we get. So it's kind of a mix. Two bites of the apple, I like that. That's great, that's great.

How's traction? What have you shared? So you guys are full stack, you're finding the IP infringements, and then you're actually sending demand letters. Someday we're going to be a vertical AI law firm, and yeah, we're handling the entire workflow right now, and a lot of it is being done through agents, but our customers just think of us as

people who get things done and they don't care about how the other, like the black box is working. That makes sense. Yeah. What metrics have you been sharing? How's demo day going? Is this your third demo day then? Uh, it is second demo day.

Yeah. Second demo day. Second demo day. Were you guys co-founders last time? What's that? Were you co-founders together last time? No, we had separate startups. Rivals, joining forces.

Social media analytics, now we're in legal. So YC alumni network is strong. Yeah, that's great. We teamed up. And yeah, Traction's going great. We just crossed 100,000 ARR. We're working with the biggest media entertainment companies in the world now expanding to brands,

doing stuff like marketing compliance. So yeah, that's great Well, congratulations We will talk to you soon, let's bring in the next team. How are you doing? Introduce yourself how you doing? We gotta give him a hat a TB TBPN hat. Oh yeah, definitely. How you doing? I'll sell. Introduce yourself.

Swap. That's amazing. Here. Perfect. Let's swap. Yeah. So hi guys. I'm Anand, CEO of Q-Fex.

Cool. We're making a 24-7 stock exchange. Okay. So we're going to let institutions and retail trade traditional assets like U.S. equities and commodities, real-time 24-7, without brokers, loads of leverage. Just like you had with crypto. Loads of leverage! Exactly.

Who doesn't love leverage, right? How's the traction been? It feels like it's really hard to get these things off the road. And what's the underlying... Is this a sneaky blockchain company? There's no blockchain. No chain? There's no blockchain.

It's off the chain. It's completely off-chain. It's basically... It's like a crypto exchange, but without the blockchain parts, we've taken those improvements and moved them over to traditional assets world. And the traction is good. We've been running it, well, we've not been running it to the YC batch because we're not licensed yet. But we- You've been running some internal experiments.

Yeah, some internal experiments to current YC batch. And due to those experiments. We're launching in a couple of months with a license and Offshore offshore in Bermuda. We'll get you Yeah, exactly free run if you come visit our office there you go I was a quant yeah tower research before okay, and my co-founders at Citadel. Well did you get into this? I was a quant, yeah, at Tower Research before. And my co-founder was at Citadel. Well, you're our quant now. Yeah, exactly. Well, congratulations.

Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon. We'll talk to you soon. It's a call to progress. Great to meet you guys. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. Come on down.

Loads of leverage. Loads of leverage. We love to see it. Welcome to the stream. Tell us what you're building. Wait, were you here last time? Were you not? No.

No, no, no. Sorry, sorry. I thought I recognized another company. Minerva, yeah, it does seem like a similar name. Anyway, introduce yourself. What are you building? Yeah, I'm building AI accounting for small businesses. Oh, OK, cool.

How's it going? Do you have small businesses on the platform already? Yeah, yeah, we have a few small businesses. We're just trying to automate all of their bookkeeping. So, you know, chase people down for receipts, make calls. I feel like there's so much that's already built into the accounting suites. Like, do you have to sit on top of QuickBooks or do you actually pitch people, hey, let's rip out what your existing accounting solution? No, we're sitting on top of QuickBooks. There's no point replacing the software. Yeah, we're just replacing the service side of things.

So consolidating all the scattered data that, you know, sits in all different kinds of places. Your WhatsApp, your email, your Stripe, everything. How's traction? Sorry? What were you doing before YC? I was building a health tech business. We were selling AI patient triage software to clinics. Awesome, cool. How's traction been?

How's the raise going? How's demo day been? Yeah, demo day's been great. We are raising two million dollars and roughly like three quarters finished, so just trying to wrap it up. Fantastic, congratulations. Classic, two on 20.

That's great. Love it. Well done. Congratulations, hope you have a great rest of your demo day. Thank you. Last one, bringing it in, closing it out strong with the Sim Studio. Sim Studio.

Are you simulating things? Yes, we are. I'm simulating. What's going on? Hey, how are you? Nice to meet you. Simming. OK, yeah.

How you doing? Great. I'm doing great. How are you? I'm great. Break it down for us. What are you building? It's an open source platform to build AI agents.

OK. Yeah. So it's developer focused. It's like a Figma-like canvas to build agents. Interesting. How. So it's developer focused. It's like a figma light canvas to agents. Interesting. Uh, how many get hub stars you got? We got to ask 50 to 4,000 in the last two months. Wow. Wait, wait, you, you were at 50 and now you have 4,000. Yes. Wow.

I appreciate that. Thanks. Yeah. 4,000 get hub stars. You'll love to see it. Yeah. I can't believe Gary let us bring these in. 4,000 GitHub stars, you'll love to see it. Congratulations. We got two more. We got to- I can't believe Gary let us bring these in. Oh yeah, he let us. We have to clean them after.

It's going to be interesting. Anyway, how's Traction been on the sales side? I imagine you have a product that you actually sell on top of it, not a non-profit? Yeah, yeah. So yeah, we can't disclose revenue numbers, but we have a lot of great customers. Cool. So yeah, Department of Defense, Mercure, Epic Global. Oh wow but we have a lot of a great customers. Cool. So yeah Department of Defense Yeah, our core epic global. Oh, wow

Yeah, what were you doing before this so I was at Berkeley and Michael this so I was at Berkeley and my Berkeley baby right across the bay go there love it love Berkeley yes completely covered everywhere I appreciate it thank you what's next for you guys next is just making our customer that the Department of Defense?

Where do you even go from there? Yeah, I mean, just making developers happy, like building the product out more and more. And I think developers love us, and big customers love us, so we're just keeping that energy going, keep launching new products, building the team. We have a really great killer engineering team from friends at Berkeley, so yeah,

we're excited to just keep growing and keep building. What's the key value prop for building a platform We have a really great killer engineering team from friends at Berkeley. So yeah, we're excited to just keep growing and keep building. Amazing. What's the key value prop for building a platform for AI agents? Is it interoperability between different models? Is it the ability to scale? Is it just price and cost and speed? Yeah, I think the question I have is,

even last YC batch, there was companies with this pitch. And I think the challenge is, everybody wants to build infrastructure and fixing troubles for agents. But then it feels like you can build good software, but it's maybe even harder to get the kind of companies that can build high quality agents that actually have value. What's the secret to finding even customers that are not

just going to sign up but actually get value out of the product? Yeah, that's definitely true. I think a lot of people, especially right now, it's very in vogue to adopt AI. And so there's a lot of top-down push from companies to adopt these AI implementations. But I think the biggest thing for us

is that we're focused on not creating easy abstractions to make it easy to use. And I think that's where a lot of people fell short. It's like you're creating these abstractions that make your platform easy to use, but it's actually not powerful enough to really put AI into your production system. And so for us, we're really focused on actually, it might be a little more, like it might be

a harder to use, but because we remove the abstractions, you can actually power relatively complex applications like real-world simulations, deep research, data transformations, because a lot of companies are sort of going after the sales and marketing you know use case and for us are more focused on the developers and actually production systems. Interesting. Awesome. How much is real-world simulation like scaling right now? We've talked to some of these companies and it seems like it's almost like video generation it feels like very nascent we really haven't had like this breakout Studio Ghibli moment for real world simulation like how is adoption going there?

Yeah, it's actually going quite well. I think. What are the applications? Yeah, so the applications of that are essentially simulating, I guess, one that would be interesting would be international affairs. So understanding how global events are going to play out. A political conflict.

We're using agents. Yeah, so you know a broad topic that we're yeah yeah I've heard about that with like economic modeling exactly like housing prices you can actually have agents running and it was always like yeah just like great they've found a level right right now it's like oh what if each of them has like an internal reasoning engine powered by an LLM and it's like 130 IQ instead of like yeah turn left I'm LLM and it's like 130 IQ instead of like turn left I'm running A star. Right. It's much better. Yeah and I think the thing that really our platform unlocked was being able to run thousands of agents in parallel at the same time and I think that was

one of our grounding thesis was that you know we wanted to create this environment like SIM Studio comes from building simulations of things. So launching 10,000 agents at a time, and perhaps some of them are gonna come back and give you an accurate result, or some of them might inform you in an interesting way. And so you take those aggregated results and you go do something with it. Very cool.

Thank you so much for talking to us. Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Yeah, yeah, great to meet you. Congrats. Fantastic. And that is the end of our demo day stream. Thank you to all of our partners.

We will be back in Los Angeles tomorrow live from the TBP and Ultra Demo. Thank you to the YC team for having us. It is a major white pill. San Francisco is back. Gary's hands back. He never left. YC never left. The Rosewood is back. It's just a fantastic time in San Francisco. Fantastic time to be here at YC Demo Day. Have a great afternoon. Thank you for watching. We will see you tomorrow. Goodbye.