TBPN - 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 TVPN. Today is Wednesday, June 11, 2025. We're live from the Palace of Party rounds. Oh, my God. It's YC Demo Day. Welcome to our YC Demo Day stream. That is insane. We have Gary Tan joining us. Wow, you absolutely destroyed my laptop. That is insane. We brought lots of party favors. We brought lots of activities for when we talk to founders who are doing extremely amazing things. If that's going off every time a founder hits a million dollars in ARR or signs term sheet, I think we're going to be up to our necks in confetti. We got a lot of confetti. We got some gifts we're going to be giving out.

We got some surprise gifts, some hats. We're going to take you all through it. Gary Tan, welcome to the stream. There he is. What's going on? The president of White Commander, Gary Tan, good to see you. Great to see you. It was great to see you. There's a line around the block still.

Is that right? People are pumped. 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, you know, we got the spring batch together. This is the first spring batch that we've ever done. So it's X 25 now? Yeah, yeah. Paul Graham doesn't like X. Okay.

So we're slowly replacing it with spring. Spring? Okay. Yeah. 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.

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 prontops, you know, in French. Mathematical notation for this stuff.

Maybe, yeah. Some, like, different, you know, we have the Y Combinator algorithm. That's right. Different algorithm to define the different seasons. I think that's right. I think just full word, you know, winter, spring, summer fall. Yeah. Yeah, summer fall.

Well, I mean, the energy from the founders is really electric, honestly, is insane. It's insane. It's fantastic. Like downstairs, we got a, well, the fun thing about hosting all of the investors in our house is that I got a whole whose house, our house chants downstairs. So we, yeah, we got the. 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 batch is about the last year. you know, the batch itself as a whole has been growing revenue by 10%. This time it's 12. There we go. 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. You know, then they were 110. Now they're about 130. You know, we're sort of entering super intelligence zone. Yeah. And, uh, four digit IQ incoming. Yeah, that's right.

I don't even want to talk to that. But, yeah, probably very valuable. I thought Sam's essay yesterday was very prescient. I liked it a lot. Like, that's sort of the silver lining. Like, everyone's sort of worried, you know, what's going to happen to the jobs. Like, to me, what's going to happen is the exact, I mean, it's actually an opening. Yep.

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 viewing college as kind of like, I mean, there was always a meme about like, oh, what, you put YC in the education section of your LinkedIn?

Yeah, yeah. 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, the 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 moats that, you know,

the businesses that will exist will sort of ensconce like the seven powers of the moats out there. Sure, sure, sure. And then it'll be. 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.

Yeah, yeah. You're trying to get a cornered resource. Sure, sure, sure. And then the wildest thing here is that, you know, 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 recording that. We've heard that too. We've heard that too. Yeah. There might just be something crazy going on with art history majors. They found some hack and they're all getting

employees 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 at WWDC. It feels like Apple's kind of retreating from some territory. We could be seeing more opportunity for developers. 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 open AI. There's different stuff going on with open source. 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, you know, we have seven companies in the, you know, mega tech world. Yep. But, you know what? Like, anyone can just put something on the internet and they get distribution, 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 perplexity, do I want, you know, chat GPT on there. Yeah. You know, no, like, this is actually the next sort of unfolding that needs to happen. Sure. 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, you know.

And, like, you could do it probably with 10 people, right? So if you link up these two super mega trends, like, that's the future that we want to live. Yeah, yeah. Right. Like, you can be 18 to 22. You don't necessarily have to go in, like, the credential. matters a lot less. You know what matters now? It matters your agency and your taste. Yes. Right. And so and you don't have to like go and get anyone's permission for that. The nature of

LLMs, you could 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 chat CBT that you can probably figure it out even better than having like 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 take, like I'm using my prompting to do that. And then on the back end, 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, right? Yeah, yeah.

It is not a destination of its own. It's actually, you know, this is like the self-driving car for the mind, right? I mean, even just. Yeah, or treat it like a co-worker. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All that matters is the end of output. Yeah. And if you're working on any type of project, not working with a smart collaborator is going

to lead to a worse output. And O3Pro. 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 KPI's 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 going to read this far. And so just having it as a co-pilot seems like a really, really good. How have you and the other group partners push to guide the batch around reporting on revenue, right? There's 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? What we'd like people to do is put 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, you know, opt-out at 30 days or whatever this. I think it is very, very important that founders are just don't engage in securities fraud. It's like kind of a basic thing, right? So, you know, I think that it is a great, you know, the amazing thing about the tech today is like 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-gap metrics. That's right. You know, 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 output? 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. Now I could 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 and 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.

Yeah. The good news is like, yeah. 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? Yeah. 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, you know, the sound of your own voice.

Sure. To say, you know, not to get all bicameral mind about it. But, you know, like that's where we're at, actually. Do it. Well, no, I mean, if you read, you know, PG's old essays, like, one of the things that really jumps out at me is, like, to what degree, you know, your childhood, your schooling. Like, he has so many essays about, you know, what high school is like, being a nerd. All these things really spoke to me and that the process of becoming actually a founder

is actually a journey inward to actually learn the sound of your own voice that you can make your own way, you can have agency, just because, I mean actually by definition, the startups that create new categories require a level of courage that people have to find within themselves, actually. You have to say, actually, you know what?

I know the Wall Street Journal says that, and, you know, the hater, desal 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 market, going to talk to people that have never, you know, even touched chat GPT yet, right? Like they don't know the, it's like that meme where you're in, you know, you're the tech guy like in the corner. Yeah.

And then like everyone's dancing and they just don't know. They don't, like, that's where we're at still. 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. It's crazy. 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 chatbots 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, a very funny discovery that only happens from actually trying to build in that, in that market with the latest and greatest technology. And that's what I love about YC Demode. What's your latest thing on batch sizes? Is that, are we staying, you know, where we're at? The high level is like we want as much prosperity in the world as possible.

You know, Brian Chesky is on my board. Oh, cool. You know, 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 I think that YC fundamentally is the managed marketplace. You look at an Airbnb.

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? It unlocks new experiences, travel like a human, like all these things. It's 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. That's amazing. And, 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, I 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, three, actually. Oh, three? Okay, sorry, yeah. Andrew McClest and John Shue, actually. Okay, cool.

Sorry. I almost announced. No. Yeah, Tyler, too. Okay. Yeah, yeah, that's Tyler, too. I got it. I mean, all of them created companies that exited for, you know, hundreds of millions to, you know,

page of duty as, you know, a public company, 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 15 partners total. 15 partners. That's great.

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

Wow. Right. And so, you know, I think that we're behind the eight ball, actually. Like, you know, I feel really good about this. Like, we're going to keep growing what we got here. 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 a Y Combinator into a multi-hundred-year institution. It belongs. 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 no need for it? I mean, famously Tom funded Axiom last batch. Yeah, yeah. And they're doing hundreds of millions of dollars in pure profits. 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. We'll let you get back to it. Thank you so much for coming on the stream. Thanks for having me. As always, fantastic.

Honor. Yeah. 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. Stay Moggin.

Stay Moggin. While we bring in the first, oh, we're ready. Let's do it. We got it. Fantastic. I thought we were going to have to new news. What up. Welcome to the show.

I'm John. I'm John. Nice to see you. How you doing? What's going on? How are we doing? How we doing? How we doing?

How's it down for us? How's Demodan 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. Good. Ken. Cool. CEO. Nice. Michael, CTO.

Okay. You guys just pitched like five minutes ago or ten minutes ago. Five minutes ago, we came right down here to spread the word. Yeah. How are the nerves? You guys, was that like a walk the park. Yeah, it was fun. It was fun. Because you've done it at alumni. Yes. And then probably like three to five full partnership pitches before, right? Yes. Okay. So I mean, I've probably, yeah,

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 Kisen 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 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. Cool. 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, what do you like? What do you excited about in the AI race at the foundation model levels. Yeah, I mean, we love using all of them.

We're friends. We're Switzerland, right? Google, Anthropics. We feel the same way. We have them all on the show. You're like, you're like, please let the fox in the hen house.

We're supposed to it. I mean, truly like different models are different for different things. You know, clicking on an item on the page. Like we like the computer use model for anthropic for that. Oh, okay, cool. Pulling data from a very large table. Gemini.

Oh, interesting. the biggest, bigger context window? Exactly, 100%. So, I mean, like, our approach we have tracked all this way from the end use, because they don't go to think about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It just happened. So walk me through some of those use cases, like,

what's the first customer that you've had that has been like, this, solve my problem, this is amazing. Walk me through like a very concrete demo. One of our most, one of our favorite customers to talk about is, you know, they're a voice agent for hotels. Okay. So in the Rio, the hotel in Vegas, you know, 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, But yeah, you'll talk to a voice agent. And the voice agent will take your request, right? And they'll use, like, calling to get, like, tooth. Last night, we were staying at the Rosewood, of course. Of course. And we called to get toothpaste and we're like, like, it's like, you know, you got to, I don't even want to wait, like, you know, 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. Toothace, please. And it just comes. Exactly. So how does your service integrate with that? experience because I know I pick up the phone 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 they're a toothpaste goes right up to your room. Yeah, yeah. Okay. It's out of talking to a person and they're trying to understand you, all this stuff. It just happens in. What were you guys do before this? We were, I was ahead of engineering, I'd a company called Truck Smarter. I've worked with small trucking companies, my whole career. Love them. Great big, big truck guy. But lots of experience working with legacy systems, web forms. That's where it comes from. Like every shipper in the United States is a

completely different website. I must have written dozens of these. I managed teams around hundreds. Yeah. Probably a lot of web scraping. Exactly. And, you know, now you're on and we're building Kisen so that no one has to do that again. There we go. Talk to us about the metrics. Did you share a headline number of users, ARR, something to get the investors, Yeah, I mean, we're in the hundreds of thousands of dollars of air. We started working on this. Yeah, let's blow. We got the, we got all the acronyms, all this, you know, with the A16Z.

Like, did you, did you, oh, you're all on the race? You guys got term sheets yet? Yes. We're closed around. We have a lot of these. The first term sheet of the TBPN Waxi number. No, congratulations. I love this.

These things are spreading so much debris across this 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, and this is a massive opportunity, and we're excited to sprint after it. We actually have an employee right now. One?

Yeah. Crazy enough to join us during the badge with the $5 million to bank account. That's great. We're doing a work trial. I love it. Tomorrow. So we have the money, we got to go spend it, and we're going to build a big business. Fantastic.

Well, we're rooting for you. Amazing, guys. Congratulations. Thank you for coming on. Yeah. Good luck. Thank you. Good luck, man.

Good stuff. All right. Thanks, we'll see you. Fantastic. These party poppers are a big problem. Like, it basically was spraying like, you know, little shards of paper everywhere. I think he was good. I think it was good.

As long as it didn't go in my Red Bowl, I think we're good. Let's ideally bring in the next person. want to come on let's let's let's let's let's let's let's let's let's come on okay we got some people coming into the stream the YC demo day's stream 25 welcome to the stream we come on come on you're gonna have to rush off all the confetti so we got a little excited what's up what's how you doing what's going on all right so we've emailed or or chatted before right yes yes back in the stack share days so now don't know your history by the they don't I was talking a bunch of founders they were like what yeah yeah he did what

Crazy Lord. I've been around Silicon Valley for over a decade. YC. 2012. Let's go. Good times. But 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, agenetic 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. Okay.

And so you're dealing with broken CIB. builds. You're dealing with exceptions. You're dealing with outages, like service outages from PagerDuty. All of those things are manual. Yeah. 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, am I, are you puppeteering the AWUS dev, you know, like interface? Or are you operating at a lower level? What's the actual interfaces? Is this? Are you run-pilled? Is this like a Text is the universal interface play. Yeah.

So basically you land on a developer homepage and you see all of your tasks from across those tools. So like exceptions from Century. And then you see an auto fix button for each of those tasks. So it's like a priority inbox. Got it. Right? That prioritizes everything across those developer tools and then gives you one-click actions. Got it.

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, integrated a deeper level or just puppeteering and computer use and not even not they're never known the wiser. So we're actually doing both. So some of the dev tools haven't built out a lot of agentic features. Sure. So we're building on top of their API. And then other partners, like one of our first integrations is with Century. Okay. And we integrate with Century. Yeah, okay. I remember Century. Yeah. Co-Pons is actually here. Oh, cool. Did you guys come in with this idea? Did you have to iterate to it? What did that look like? Yeah. Yeah. We did it.

We came in with it. So before this, Daniel here, at Netflix, 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, like, you know, they shipped like ads and live streaming and all these things. And that 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 moved so fast, right?

Yeah, that's a great narrative about Netflix. Exactly, right? So it really helped accelerate the team, and that had no AI. Yeah. No AI in it, right? And you can squeeze all that productivity. Yep. So then Jonas and I were chatting and were 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 slanging. Slanging bits. Exactly. Slanging the stars. How, what is the go-to-market motion?

Cursor obviously just goes bottoms up directly to the dev. Is this something that like 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, connect 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 start 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. Yes. And we have over 400 companies that have signed up for the private beta. including Gordash, Snowflades, congratulations. Golden Sachs. Golden Sachs?

Yeah. Yeah. Let's go it up for big finance. Everyone wants agents, yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. Where are you guys going from here? Did you close around already?

Yes, we have closed. There we go. There we go. Yes, yes. We were happy to give you these ramp-houts. Oh, awesome. Thank you guys. Right.

So we put the money in ramp. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, 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. Yeah, we're a classic old school YC. This is the way it was. Now there's folks coming through with 25 employees. Yeah, no, no. We incorporated right after getting into YC. Really? No way.

Awesome. We're like, all right. That's great. 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 by over 40 million developers. Yeah. And we... I think we did like an interview or something. Yes, it was an interview of the Soylent TechStack. Yeah, that's right.

How the hell are 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. Amazing. That's amazing. You guys are in an incredible position.

Yeah. I'm feeling really good about this. Yeah. You should be confident. It's going to be hard, but I think the confidence should be high. It's a good market. I mean, it's amazing how much we can get done now. Yeah.

Oh my gosh. Yeah. Right? It's never been done before, so yeah, we're excited. It also feels like an interesting market in that we've seen like 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 wood, 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. I'm really good for you. I'm really good for you keep an eye out for in this batch. Yeah, we're huge TV fans. Come on the next time you raise money. We should be watching if you're a founder. There we go.

Love you. Have a great rest of your day. Good, thank you guys. We'll see you guys. All right. 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. We're going to run out of those. How many more do we have? We have a variety of goodies. I love the sweatshirts. You're owning a color.

There we go. Ramones, yellow. You guys are running pink. You can have those if you want. There we go. Real free. They're limited addition to this demo day. You can only get them this year.

There we go. The colors are working together perfectly, roughly the same saturation. Roughly the same saturation. On the orange background. On the orange, orange pink. Yeah, this is a fever. I'm sorry. It feels kind of vintage.

It feels like I've known it. I've known it. What do you guys building? Oh, we're building an AI agent for bug find. Okay. So right now we have a PR bot. Yeah. 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. 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 pin testing. Okay. 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. We really want to basically build an agent that can do any of that or kind of what's best for your tool. So you like when people are vibe coding because they're just great bugs all the time?

Exactly. Keep vibe coding. Yeah, yeah. No, we love vibe coders. We're here to help you make better code. No problems with it 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.

Just beat it back in. Talk to me about 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 good at designing flows. It's vibe code. It's probably a lot of work that goes into that. 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,

can run code, can compile your code, it can run like unit tests. Yep. And so then we just get the agent to, yeah, go ham. And each time that it like runs a small experiment on your code, it learns a little bit more. Okay. And it's able to do, run a better test the next time. So it's able to search your repository, able to run commands to, you know, see if you, you know, 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, those, these sorts of things. So the agents able to run these like any command that a person, you know, would. Yeah. Are you doing stuff like trying to stuff multiple variables in a single function, like that type of stuff where like there isn't as much fault tolerance built into the code? Maybe they need like a, you know, if else try, except claws in there or something like that? Is that the type of like bugs that you're trying to find or is it more about like 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. Okay. So what change you make there kind of determines the path that we use for testing. Sure. So if you're trying to scale, then yeah, we'll kind of test as if you're trying to scale. Sure. But 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. Okay, interesting. So they don't, LMs don't make the same kind of errors that people do because people, with people code grows organically. Elms is like one-shotting things. Yep. So it'll often like forget to add functions. So it's not as easy as pointing to a line and going like this variable is wrong.

It's like, no, no, you like fundamentally missed like 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 it? People sign up by themselves. Are you doing founder-led sales all the above?

No, no, we're landing page. Like this is our go-to-market right now. Let's go to the guy. Let's go to the I. Go sign up. Yeah, you can just go. You install the bot. We have a seven-day free trial.

So it's... Consumption versus seat-based pricing. What are you thinking? Yeah, it's seat-based pricing. Okay. So for every developer, it's $20 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 was having a problem with their cost is probably fine. right now. But how are you thinking about that side? Yeah, you go for it. Yeah, we found that like actually for just like, you know, running lots of experiments on your code to find bugs, that it's actually better just to have

a really fast and small model. And so we've actually, yeah, we haven't had these sorts of problems yet. So what does that mean? Like Lama, fine-tuned? Are you, we've talked to LLM training companies that have trained even smaller models, like just for JSON to, you know, 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 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. And so yeah, we're like we're getting ready to do that once we like find all our pain points exactly in our current architecture.

We can train the exact right thing and these 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. Cool. And Mateo was doing his Ph.D. in reinforcement learning and formal methods. Very nice.

Yeah. So our kind of research has come together to make this happen. Trouble. 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. Yeah. We're going big. Bring some big napkins around. record. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just do it here.

Perfect. And then, yeah, it's, we're slowly kind of growing. Well, I haven't say slowly. We've doubled our growth kind of every week for the past kind of couple weeks. Nice. So 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. 1800 soon. Yeah, yeah, 1800. After this, when all of you go subscribe, yeah, then we'll be an 1800. Fantastic.

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

Oh, he's got the whole fashion. Boom, boom. We've done everything. Let's bring in the next team. How are you guys doing? Welcome to the stream. They've got the shirt. Oh, you have the shirt.

They're the shirts. Do you need one? I need one. Thank you. Thank you. Good to be you guys. Nice to meet you guys. Looking at Char.

Thank you for. We're keeping it. We're keeping a respectful. Okay. Introduce the company. What are we building? So we're Code Tool. We are building AI agents for security teams.

Cool. Sorry. We're building AI agents for security teams. Okay. Is specifically cybersecurity teams, are we talking DDoS? Are we talking somebody goes in and tries to steal secrets, steal data? What are you talking about? So, like, you know, you can think of cybersecurity is split into like AppSec and Opsec where Apsk's like, you know, defending, you know, your deployed software out into the world.

And then Opsack is like operational security, right? Where it's like, you know, protecting your employees from fishing. We're definitely more on the automation side for the Opsk side of house. So think of like basically 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 what happens. Like, you know, Eddie signed in from Singapore. Is that legit or not? Yeah, it's like, well, he was in the office earlier today. He couldn't have possibly gotten there because hypersonic travel doesn't exist.

Exactly. Exactly. Not quite yet. But not just legalized. That's going to make it really complicated. No, no, it's going to get from L.A. to Tokyo in two hours. Exactly. Well, I guess he did log in In Tokyo. He's going for sushi. It's funny because I think like a lot of people have like this like hacker aesthetic in their mind when they think of cybersecurity, which is like a lot of like, you know, 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 like people triaging

tickets day in and day out and that kind of thing. So like our goal is basically to like automate a lot of the BS that these teams have to go through and like a lot of like the annoying stuff and then like allow them to get back to work kind of thing. 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? So our first customer was Ramp.

A Rino, yeah. Wow, let's go back. Wow. That's all right. I mean, we're already, I mean, that's tough. You're kind of starting. That's good time. Is money safe both.

Come on. There's nice. I mean, Eric Ramp is just an incredible CEO. Yeah, right. Yeah. But the motion is we really want in bed with this like the most cutting edge, like the best teams like RAMP, that can actually like inform us as much as we're helping them on how the best teams operate. Wow.

And so we're looking for like sort of tech forward. Enterprise is like it would be awesome. But yeah, anyone that's like, you know, pushing the boundaries and what's, you know, possible automation wants. Okay. And what does the integration point look like? Is it, is it a single, you know, 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, it's, I think basically where it is, is like, ideally what we would have 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, it's, we're heavily leveraging AI tool calling. So the idea is is like we plug into all the different points in your Slack. Think like Octa, think like Panther, think like all of these different products kind of thing.

And like basically then what we're able to do is deploy out and like 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 like tackle their task 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 kind of like build up a nice collection of agents, to start getting a good network effect, IKEA effect, where like people are like building their own agents, sharing them out into the world. And then from there, we can kind of like move out to wider and wider and like less technical teams where it's basically like we can kind of like start to plug into people's

stacks and like wholesale automate out of the gate and like solve a lot of these problems. How did you two meet? So we grew up together in Santa Barbara, California. We, uh, we have, you know, lived together for since, you know, we went to school. But yeah, our third co-founder is just outside. He's, uh, he's probably watching this right now. But yeah, we were really stoked when you guys watched our launch video. Oh, yeah.

We did on the show. We were the mole. Wait, you guys are that company. Wait, wait. Oh, that was the best. 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 extreme. It was tasteful. It was funny. It was perfectly timed. Yeah, it just made it funny.

Where did that? Where did that come from? Well, so it's funny, we were scared it was going to flop, to be honest. I mean, we didn't know how it would land, and we're happy with how it did. But, no, we came with the idea. We worked with, like, one of my friends growing up does comedy in LA. And I live in O.A. But, like, she had to do a director who, like, was, like, amazing.

And his friends that were also, like, actors and stuff got in and acted for us. And so it's like, it all came together with friends of friends. And it looked incredibly polished. Can you give us an order of magnitude on the budget for that thing? It was, it was, it was, let's see, five digits. Five digits, but not. Extremely loud. That's a big.

That's a good. It looked like a, it looked like a hundred thousand dollar project. But it was actually, it was actually pretty funny. We showed the original idea came from Gary actually. We showed him the demo in the first week of, and he's just like, we start like showing him how you can like query slack and that kind of stuff. He's like, oh, you guys got to do the Ripling thing. And we're like, oh my God, yeah, we got to do the Ripley 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 couple of things and we're like, fuck, okay. It's going back in like editing and stuff like that. But it was funny because it's like YC on YC on YC violence. But it's really just like, look, like they're going to sort their thing out. You guys are just having fun. Did that ad catalyze around for you guys? It did.

Nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we, yeah, I think a ton of investor inbound off that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, no, it makes it. It really grounds it because like not everyone works in cybersecurity every day. It can be a little abstract. There we go.

There we go. Yeah, boys. Yeah, 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.

No, it's, I'm super excited for you guys. I think we got to give them a different hat for this. I mean, it's the best. Oh, man. We can give you two of these. Let's go. It's a special edition. Congratulations.

Thank you so awesome. 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. Cheers. That is fantastic.

I'm so glad we got to talk to this, guys. That was such a good video. Out of the year. Out of the year. Out of the year. And right at the perfect time because we, We were just hitting like peak vibreel, right? Yeah, and if they dropped it even a month later,

it would have been staying. Welcome to the stream. I'm John. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. I'm John. How are you doing PMF for? Or die since you're soon?

Everyone died. Everyone died. You didn't hear the story about PMF or die? They died. They died. It happens sometimes. Never lock yourself in a room for the 90 days. Instead, move to sunny San Francisco.

Do YC. That's our recommendation. Basically the same. From here on that. 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 really. You could go by brothers. People ask us. People ask us. Yeah, yeah. What does the company do? We're doing agenic people search.

So we have a database, people database of around 200 million people. Interesting. We use agentic search or 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 salesperson 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, like, deploy an LM. Okay. Assign every profile to that LLM. And then given your criteria, that could be, like, one paragraph

long. We would just ask the LLM if this profile, like, meets that criteria. and then we built like a load distributor to run like 10,000 LM calls in parallel. Wow. Do that at scale? You know, we can search over like 5 million profiles in like 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, you know, 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. years and they still work there. And there's probably like 25 people in the world that fits that profile and we found all 25 of them.

Just 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 LLMs get better than more computers. 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 ahead of time. Makes sense.

So who's, who, who, what buyer or what buyer are. in 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 meta, for example. Yeah, I mean, yeah, we work with Mercor right now, for example.

Oh, Mercor, okay, cool. So, you know, like, just like people hunting for talent, but it's like a generalized type of skill, right? So, for example, you know, like in AI Labs training a new voice model and they need, like, people that speak Cantonese. Sure. It's like, okay, I find me every Cantonese speaker in the U.S. that has like a podcast presence.

Yeah. And they're like, okay, great, these guys can come sharing our voice models, right? Like, that's kind of bad. Or they might even need someone

who speaks Cantonese and also as an expert in biology. Yeah. So they can talk about the biology terms. And that's something that, how are you going to search for that link to? 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 L.A. Yeah. That has experience in film. But, you know, but it's also part of teapot. That's basically what we need to get off the time. You should try later.

It's a sense of humor. It's like, How would you even know that? Well, if you look through their posts, I'm sure you can figure it out. I mean, it's basically, like, as close as you can, if you're just correct, give like a criteria to human recruiter. Totally. So you can imagine like 5,000 human recruiters, just like 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. Like, I'm guessing, like, you know, any, like, deep research query costs is like $10 maybe. Okay. But then, you know, like we, we recharge for conversion with our PPD customers. A conversion, okay. Yeah, yeah. We recharge by conversion.

Cool. So that's probably pretty expensive, which is great. Yeah. And also, we have, like, a platform that's just available to everybody. Got it. So they can pay us to subscription fee, search as much as they want. Very cool. Do email enrichment phone number.

I feel like we can use this. We might be particular customers. Yeah, we need a guess that doesn't hate tech. That's talking about this. How did you two meet? What were you doing before, YC? Yeah, so we met in elementary school, actually. So we were originally from Canada.

Let's go. We went in elementary school. And we became close friends. Yeah. Yeah, it's been great here. But 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. That's our great. That's our great. You just couldn't load anything. I had homework. You didn't even have homework. It was during school. And then ultimate prank.

Uninstall windows on your best friends. Boys being boys. And we spent one semester of college each. So I was a Penn. He was at UC San Diego. And then come January, we were both like, like, why are we even there? Let's drop out. Right.

So you guys 18, 19? We're both 18 right now. Wow. Here we go. Yeah. What's the youngest team that you've met here besides yourselves. 17.

17. 17. Okay. I know. I'm not when at dinner. I'm doing some robotics. It is getting younger. Yeah.

Yeah. We have a bottle of wine here. We're going to give it to that. You're going to the youngest. Hopefully you're not going back through YC in three years. Hopefully you're at the NACAC or something. Talk to me about traction, metrics. Anything that you're sharing here at Demo Day?

Anything to get the venture capitalist. Excited. Yeah. 270 paying customers. Wow. So I don't. I don't know if you guys heard about linked. Linked? No.

Yeah, yeah. So a very early version of this product we launched, which is like Rank Stanford, like Stanford, like Stanford, 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, and then, and then we had this, we had this app where people can like see two random alumni put next to them next to each other and then you're

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. Very cool, very cool. And then, you know, we came down here, 207 paying customers, about 16,000, my month recurring revenue. That's great. Since all three weeks ago.

Yeah. Yeah, wow. Is this team just you two right now? So there's three of us. We were two companies. Okay, cool. Our founding engineers from high school. Cool.

He just got to go to the high school. The same high school. Yeah, we all went to the same high school. That's amazing. Yeah. No, I'm super excited for you guys. Congratulations on YC. We're going to get on the product.

And I actually have a bunch of people to send this to. Yeah, this is fantastic. Yeah, you should give it a try. Fantastic. Thank you so much. Yeah. We'll talk to you soon. Bye.

See me in you guys. Fantastic. Let's bring in the next team. If we have one, come on down. How are you doing? Aaron, what's up? Aaron. So this is a YC alumni.

He just raised a series A today. Congratulations. Yeah, we were trying to make this happen for the last week. Amazing. But he just announces series A today, 17 million. 17 million. Congratulations. There we go.

I mean, we have stuff to celebrate 17 million. I already got the hat. Yeah, I get the hat. Hey. Congratulations. Seems like you've done that a couple times. Yeah, yeah. This is the biggest round of the day.

This is the biggest round. Who did the round? How far? long are you? How big is the company? Give me some stats. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So 8VC did by the way, guys, this is awesome. I did like the interview with Venture Beat and this, I'm way more star-struck by this. So like, I'm not just saying that, but I'm like, all right. Yeah, so 8VC led the round. Cool. Let's go. What partner? Absolutely dog. What partner are you working with?

Jack Moschkowitz. He's great. He's fantastic. Yeah, yeah. So how far along? So we're, and were you in the last batch? We were, we were a couple batches ago. We were summer 23. Cool. Great vintage. Was that still remote? Or was that back in person? No, we were the first back.

Back. There you go. We had an advantage. Very nice. But yeah. So outset does AI moderated research? Okay. So what does that mean?

It's like when big companies have to do a ton of research. Nestle has to go figure out what, you know, whether they should launch this weird version of Dejorno pizza or something. They go do research. So either they're running massive surveys and they're getting like very low fidelity data. They're 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 not actually cost effective. So now you can run AI-led interviews. So that means AI is leading the conversation, digging in, following up, probing deeper, and synthesizing all that for you. How big is the legacy market? So the research market is like 140 billion. It's actually a really big one.

Yeah. Just like, yeah, there's like huge companies that you probably may have never heard like Ipsos and Kantar and like these like big guys that are just kind of sitting there. So there's a lot of opportunity. And yeah, we work with like 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 like 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 then you audio and they can even share their screen. Yeah. So 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 was obvious. Because the avatar is something like weird, uncanny value stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And you're just like a random. People are 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 doing some research. Totally. Like, you like, suddenly see that. You're going to be all weirded out. So it's actually much better to have AI come through with voice and text. Yeah. Talk to me about recruiting.

We partner with a number of different companies that do nothing but panels. Like nothing but recruiting. Nothing but recruiting. So you have like user interviews and prolific. And they probably get some demographics and some basics. They get all that. And they have millions of people that are like ready to like. It's like gig work.

Yeah. And so they can. Okay. And you know, 100,000 people that drink energy drinks to give me feedback. Exactly. Exactly. What? Yeah.

You could 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, for 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. 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 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 like, it's literally not possible. It's like just laws of physics don't allow it. Yeah. And so they're able to do that. They can do multilingual. They can kind of do it all at once.

So you can wind up like unlocking actual like stuff you've never heard. Can I curse on this? Oh, we usually don't. But you're free to you. Stuff that they like 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, you know, it's like we're hitting multiple models, but Azure, we're using a lot of Azure actually to open AI models under the hood through Azure. Yeah.

And it's, so- Is there a model router helpful? I saw they announced that at build. I haven't talked to anyone that's actually used it. I don't know yet, actually. So I don't think we've played with that yet. So basically, like, what we need is just incredible amount of reliability because what we'll have is like three customers are all running like 500 simultaneous interviews. So we have to actually scale very, very quickly. And also like a lot of our customers, like the Nestle of the world, like they care a lot about like super safe,

super reliable. So we kind of like wind up needing the kind of Azure. Yeah, and then you're also probably going through like peak

LLN usage hours too because you're not doing in the middle of the night no, no, we can't just like process it on our own time. It like has to happen in that moment.

But then we also fall back to open AI. We use Gemini for stuff 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 or you're 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 it'll be like, okay, yeah, now I'm a believer in the avatar thing because it is photo real. 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, that response. So that matters way more. And that's going to be way better than text. And that's way better than. 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. Sure, sure, sure. 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 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, like,

light 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 much as research. We're like, do you care that it's AI? Like, no, like, I get it. Right? In fact, they, like, have even expressed that, like, they'll share more because there isn't a person. Sure, 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 to another human. I will just tell you, look, I want this to be faster. Or I want this to be 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 it. But with AI, they like shared everything about their life story. 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.

Yeah. Has there been any pull at the lower end? to 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 might just like, talk to your customers.

We don't want you as a customer if you don't want to go. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's basically, like, I think a good, a good reason not to use an AI moderator is like if you could sell to that person, probably don't outsource that, right? Like, maybe to build the relationship yourself. So the truth is, especially all the B2B stuff, there's not as much. You usually turn around and say come back when you're like a couple hundred people and like 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. So how are you thinking about actually compressing that 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, yeah, I did a deep research report.

And then 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 like, all right, all desk research is now commoditized. So what if you just ask a question? You just want to, like, learn from real people that's much more up to date, that whatever,

like your own proprietary data, it should be the same kind of idea, right? End to end agents are doing that. But today, like, the premise of AI kind of scaling your qualitative research, is like 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 going to 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 you do this with GLG and yeah. That's right. No, this is a huge opportunity actually. So yeah. I have a whole side thought. I think one of the challenges there is with the expert networks is all about finding the right people.

Sure. But if you're in a situation where you can find the right people and you can find 100 of the right people. Well, we just had Plato AI on. You should talk to them. They're in this batch. They do like LLM-based people search. So you can find like every person at Databricks that was a former founder. No, there's an opportunity to connect all of that through that.

But what I was going to 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 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 it and segment it so it's like a whole analytics suite yeah on top of qualitative data which is like not a thing that has ever been done yeah 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 oh yeah yeah harsh to gar yeah

Harsh hired me. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. He, yeah, he, yeah, he, anyway, so, 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, I was a consultant where I was doing like this work nonstop.

Where I was like, are you a nominative determinism guy? Yeah, yeah. He's looking for the capital canon. You're an absolute canon. To fire a billion dollars into research. I have not capitalized on that. I was looking at that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

We're big, we're big. We're big into the name. are the truth. I like that. I like that. I have a friend who always calls me the loose canon.

Yeah. You can never know what to expect. You know, it's a little bit too much. Dial it in the capital can. Yeah. You can trust it with your capital.

Just give it to him. Oh, yeah. I'm going to pivot off of loose cannon on the capital. Capital canon. Yeah. Aaron Capital Canon.

There you go. Anyway, this is fantastic. Thanks very much. Congratulations. Congratulations. I'll have you back on. Yeah.

17 million dollar series. Let's go. Fantastic. Biggest round we've heard yet. Let's bring in the next guest operative. There we go. The streets are going on. The pit vipers are going on.

Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? Hey, how's it going? Good to meet you. I'm John. Eric, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you guys. You're going to want to keep those mics close to you because it's noisy here at YC Demo Day 2025.

Good to meet you. Can you introduce yourself and the company that you're building? Awesome. Yeah, we're operative. I'm Chris and Chris Settles. This is my co-founder, Eric Kingtonia. You can introduce yourself as well. 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 10 years later, here we are. Deep, deep. What did you guys do between that and now? Yeah, do you want to tell other programming languages? Do you want to tell more of the story? Yeah, I mean, we went to college.

Maybe you still write Java. I don't know. Yeah, we went to college, worked out a couple big tech companies, worked at a couple startups. So, yeah, yeah. Amazing. All right, Pete. Chris was at Uber. You could talk about that.

There we go. Nice. Did you wear the pit vipers during your main pitch? Sorry? Oh, you're asking where the sun's, did you wear them while you were pitching the phone? 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 do you guys doing? All right. So we're working on web app code generation for internal APIs. Awesome. So you can imagine having like 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. And I mean, that's just one use case you can think about. But you can build any kind of front end application that can. to existing APIs you have in your company. Yeah, I remember like when you set up like a Django website, you kind of get like the Django admin, like out of the box, and you can just in, you know, 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, do you want to give one? Yeah, I mean, a lot of the use cases are centered around like customer service, so people like want to interact with the other like a database.

Sure. Who are doing support want to, want to, like, change, like, payments and stuff like that. Yeah. Data visualization, stuff like that. Okay. So, yeah, I mean,

is it unique about, like, bringing different services together? Because a lot of, like, smaller companies would say, you want to, you want to look at the payments admin? Head over to your Stripe dashboard. Yeah. Right. Where are,

where companies currently falling short? Is it that they're not bringing the data together across services? Or is it that they're developing, like, like their own databases and their own their own tables that just don't have a don't have an API out of the box or don't have a don't have a web app in front of their API out of the box. Yeah. Yeah. So as so definitely startups is super easy to just say, okay, yeah, check out the Stripe dashboard,

manage them. And then that's what Stripe does. Typical customer service flow is like, yeah, you go to Shopify for this, and then you go to the CMS for this. Yes. Then you go to Stripe if there's a problem over there. And then you got payroll. It's all SaaS products.

Yeah, but one of the things we like, we noticed, especially at our, 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 building, needing to build all these different internal tools to like 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. Got it.

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, 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. They're cool. Yeah.

Yeah, in some ways it makes sense being able to like quickly generate something, test it, and then like it's very different than sort of these like 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 sort of traction. with the consumer product, we decided we want to work on this enterprise direction and or larger organization direction because of these 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 want to say the exact name. And we're planning to kind of just leverage our warm intro outbound network, or warm intro

network to be able to talk to some more organizations. And I think like there's some, there's actually a large, percentage of companies that even will try to use like retool to build internal apps. And so we like we think we can work with some of the other YC companies that are doing things like that or using that. And, but maybe have. I was, I was at the re tool or are you guys,

are you guys working with Retool or you, you, you can be with like, kind of competing in some sense of it. Good luck. We're talking about. He's an absolute dog. He's a monster.

But we, good luck. We have a big market. Yeah, we have a pretty cool direction that's like pretty unique. at the moment, so we're excited to go after. Talk to me about the actual instantiation of the web app. I'm sure you're using AI and code generation.

What's working? How much are you leveraging O3 or Claude or Open Source or Gemini? What are you looking for? Where are the models falling short? 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 like a nice foundation. But we try to leverage good tools. So, like, viewing a file tree, we had a browser agent on top to test and validate the app. Okay. The model's far short in, I think they're good at, like, going zero to one. But I think, like, 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.

Okay. Yeah. Have you benchmarked against how long it takes someone to build a web app for a on top of a private API? using cursor and just saying, I'm going to 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, 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, this wasn't even AI.

You know, you just have like, oh, you want to, you want to put the, you want to instantiate this as a blog. Okay, here you go. Yeah. What are you benchmarking against? Actually, maybe a cool story, like on the backstory of how we came across this. is that we actually started with people wanting to develop apps like inside cursor. And so one of the kind of unique insights we had is that today, like, developing any kind of

like 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 wanted to. Sure, sure. And you can go and like then tell cursor like, okay, I want to, you know, move the blue button inside the black box. Yeah. And you have to like just keep prompting it until it does that. So actually one thing Eric and I worked, the first thing Eric and I worked on was like,

like 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. He's just giving us feedback on it. And we grew that to like around 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, code gen and be able to have all of this code generation with testing built in. So that way we can allow users to like 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 back by Weekend Fund and also a few other angel investors. And we are, we're still raising and open to chatting with other investors. We have an angel investor and Retool investment in us. So play the hits.

It hits. Let it hits. Find something you love and just. 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 100, or sorry, a thousand stars. That's pretty good, yeah.

We just launched the consumer product. It got around 2,500 different users. Okay, cool. Building, using operative to build apps. Yeah, that's great. And right now there's like about a 4% conversion from free to pro plan. We have a pretty generous free tier, so you can go and use that however it 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 we're, that's our, it lies with the consumer product, but we're planning to scale more revenue. Yeah, I think the enterprise, you could probably get that on your first contract. Exactly. Thank you for stopping by. Please. Thank you.

Thank you. Have fun out there. It's great having you on. Awesome. Cheers. All right. Let's bring in the next crew. We are at YC Demo Day.

Hey, how you, tell you, how much, file? Come on. What's up? It's time to talk sleep scores. Let's talk sleep last night. It was brutal. I was at the Rosewood. The Rosewood doesn't have eight sleep.

It's a big problem. Yeah, not yeah. 90% of the guests there. What's happening? Good to see you. I want to talk F1. I want to talk F1. You just did an interview with Charlotte Clare.

Yeah. 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 just for elevation? Elevation. 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. There is when he really prepares the season. Yeah. And then his obsession for every single detail when he travels, all the gadgets that he brings with himself,

from, you know, devices for a record. Covery, Icebath, 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.

Yeah, yeah. And a lot of athletes in Formula One now, they use this vests. Oh, yeah. Cooling vests. Oh, interesting. But they don't really work. Okay. And so the way you want to really cool your body, you need to cool the palm of your hands.

Oh, interesting. So I was with my co-founder, Max, and we said, what if we build cooling gloves for you? You said, oh, that would be interesting. So we built the gloves in three days. No way. And then one of us, one of our people, they flew to meet him in Barsa. In Barsasas, there 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 no, for Scuderia Ferrari, blah, blah. And so he was on the cover of the Instagram account. With the AISLIN. Let's go. And so he was free branding for us. With the device we built for him.

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 control. It's the perfect sponsorship for you. So he saw him using this. And so paddle players, tennis players, they all say, okay. I use it.

But man, we did we didn't. You're a one-off. Yeah. It's a one-off. And so now we have a team that is building the schooling glows or a few athletes. That's incredible. Great partnership. 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, yeah. I do a bunch of investing. I invested like probably 20 companies in this batch. Already. Wow. You got to get it.

You got to get them in here. You need to start early or then you're out. Oh, yeah. You gotta get in early. We gotta get in early. And so in every batch, I try to invest in around 20% of the batch, 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 AIDS sleep because it's a gadget. You can give it to someone for, you know, Christmas, and they experience it every day in a very different way than just nap on their phone. Have you seen anything?

So I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, answer your question, but it's cool because I walk around with my head. And people stop me and they say, oh, I sleep on your product. I just met two founders and one I had a 75 score, the other one at 48 score. Oh, no, that's true. 48. We're never, we're never, that doesn't work. I've been smoking jority this week.

I got, I beat him twice. 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 got it's, I got it's just talking to a few founders, even when I look back, other companies starting with us, they were struggle. So we have been so lucky to be here today. But you see a lot of really cool stuff now in robotics. Yep, yeah, manic robots. Yeah, yeah, we've hired those. It's been really cool.

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. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, yeah, 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. then Y.C. has 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 robots, things will get easier because robots will explode and a lot of consumers 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 leafboard. 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. Yeah, yeah. So, just putting cameras everywhere.

It's camera and lights. Yeah, right? I would immediately buy that if you could go around my house and make sure that. Especially if you could put a gun on it. Yeah. I mean, Amazon, 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, I wanted that. When the fires were happening, I figured out that a lot of fires in L.A. are just started from a single ember landing in like a backyard or on a house or get stuck. And you just realize that, you know,

there's probably an opportunity for drone-based. Yeah, there's actually a couple companies that did, like, water turrets that you mount to your roof. And then if they see fire, they can just spray 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 sell a lot of those. What about it eight? Any other hardware coming down the line that you can talk, you can kind of allude to yet? So actually, we have an office in the SF. So I just landed. I came here.

I'll be here for a couple of hours. Then I go to the office to see the new products. I'm already sleeping on the next generation. There you go. That's such an edge. You're on pod five. I'm already on pod six. All my friends, they always don't 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. 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. Sure. 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 we can convert your bed in a health platform and save your life, that's pretty sick.

Yeah. 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's here. And what? Yeah, because I was at school, I decided to drop out. I thought there was this opportunity for AI 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.

And so when you see these people, right? I don't care what happens with your company, but I admire you so much. Can I give you a check? Of course, because I want to back the founder. Exactly. And so that is what excites me.

Like to stay young 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.

It's been great. Let's bring in the next team. Welcome to the YC Demo Day, 2025 stream. I put so much of the... Yeah, yeah, it's okay. I'm working through it. How are you guys doing? You guys already got the hats on.

We'll see if there's other surprises in the store. We might need to blow the whistle. Let's add out. Welcome to the stream. How you do? I like how you guys just said, made in SF, not made with love. Made with...

Making shots. We have a made with love in San Francisco as well. Oh, you do, okay. Well, what is Throxie? Break it down for us. Explain the business. We're building AI agents that help people selling into traditional industries,

such as manufacture, Okay. Distribution. Okay. There are sectors in which selling is very hard, especially from a B2B perspective. Sure. So we're helping those companies prospect into legacy industries. Okay.

And we manage the entire outreach to those. Okay. Whenever someone's interested in speaking with my clients, I connect them with their buyers. Sure. And 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 service.

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 better software design software that runs on this or automates the facility. You're going to 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 going to 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. Yep. 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 like rolling them out. So talk about the co-pilot 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 ultimatable part is qualified the whole companies. So, like, 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, like, any specific specifications? Do they have, like, this grind type?

Do they do like CNC mailing? 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 CNC's, why should they 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 an SDR three companies, completely different value propositions. But I think one of the big issues was actually. 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, it actually was. And, uh,

but yeah, 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 disrupt yourself 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 that

how are you getting data that's our insight like our insight is like LinkedIn doesn't like serve these manufacturing people because the owner of like in manufacturing company is not on LinkedIn. Their prospects are not there. So we've built our own like crawlers, which are like crawling the whole Google knowledge graph from scratch. And then like sending agents to qualify these people, which have access to like specific tools with directories of other manufacturing companies

or API like access to like 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 annual. That might be the biggest one we've heard yet. That might. Let's go. Oh, $1.5 million, baby.

Let's go. Congratulations. That's amazing. So the round's already closed, I imagine. No. There's a lot. Absolutely. Dogs, absolute dogs.

That's fantastic. What's your guys' backstory? How did you get to YC? We met in high school and we've always be like building stuff since we were kids. Awesome. I love it. Pablo was like, I hate sales, but like I love money. I was like, let's go build a company together.

I was working in AI, JPM Morgan as like the most boring thing to do ever. Working in the back. So I was like, let's go to it. That's amazing. That's amazing. How big is the team? Sounds like you've already scaled this business a little bit. Yes, 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. Whenever AI does better, we're automated. But if not, we have us actually doing that work. Yep.

We want to 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 AISDR of Throxy. is 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. Thanks very much. 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 one hat. Let's go. Let's go. I've got to give out a second hat. How are 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 Harvey. And we build open source multimodal search for AI agents and applications. Okay. Open source multimodal search. Give me some examples of the multimodality. What are we searching? Because some of these datasets are imagining if you're trying to search over YouTube videos, YouTube's going to 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 scanned. Yeah, PDFs are an eyeman. The PDF spec is a disaster. We know this. We've known this for decades. It's not getting any better. Adobe, click it up.

What we do is we embed pages directly as images and retrieve over those. That is much high-acted. You can see much, much better performance. Yep. Very cool. Are you guys going to be able to fix the photos app? Searching photos. Very hard.

We love to if Apple gives us a chance. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Give them a shot. Give them a shot, Tim. It does seem like they're trying to do that type of multimodal search on cross of it, but they're just not there yet in terms of like I'll be searching for, you know, 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? 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 like lots of documents with like tables, charts. Pattern drafting, for example, has like 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 Gleen yesterday raised what, 150 million at 7.2 billion. This feels somewhat a and 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 we're much more of a developer tool. Sure. And the way we see this going is actually not as a competitor to clean, but more of like a provider to glean. Okay. And not just glean, but to people that are building

like cursor for X and you need to deal with multimodal documents. Sure. That's exactly what we can help you with. So we're starting with search, but that's not it, 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 models as like code, that ends up, like, performing a lot better.

And you can start building cursive for video editing. How did you guys meet? What were you doing before YC? We're both brothers. Oh, no way. Yeah. Before YC, I was a software engineer at MongoDB. Oh, cool.

And this guy dropped out from Congress. So the open source thing, tracks. Dropped out of where, right? Yes, exactly. Cornell. Nice. Very cool. Yeah, talk to us about the open source strategy.

How closely are you mimicking MongoDB? We heard earlier 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 close source. So things like SSO, things like connectors like Google Drive. etc. Or maybe like speeding it up for 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 all has to be open source because you only have one person. That's true. You ought to be a good problem. That's a good problem now.

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? We're at 2,600 stars today. Congratulations. That's fantastic. 4,000 monthly downloads. Amazing.

Thank you, Jordi. 200 active deployments in production. Fantastic. There we go. The audience is probably mad at me in the chat for that one. 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, yeah, building on from there. Did you always want to start a company together? Yes. That's amazing.

Dream since we were kids, but yeah. Incredible. Incredible. That's great. 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. We'll be following a lot. Yeah, we're excited to use cursor for video. Whenever that, whenever that we ever builds that, send them our way. Yeah, they'll probably build it on top of your company. So thank you so much for stopping by.

Sounds like, we'll talk to you so much. Thanks, you're coming on. Bye. See you. Do we have anyone else? There's a little bit of lunch break going on, giving you some inside baseball here at YC Demo Day 20, 25.

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 working. And the pit viperers. have made a return. I think it's all one pair of pit viper's and keeps 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. We love us. Cliety. Cliety. Clidey. All right. What are you guys up to? What are you guys building? We're building automatic technical documentation for codebase. 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, but we're starting off with series A B onwards companies, majorly because that's when you start onboarding people, you need internal documentation to actually give technical specification for your product, so on, so yeah,

initial focus on series A&P. Specifically for companies that are delivering APIs that they sell access to? Not just APIs, but 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, yeah. There's a number of open source projects that kind of allow you to stand up a boilerplate 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. 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, like, in the background. Yeah. So there's no different. 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-hustable. Okay. So especially for an enterprise, when they have to be compliant, that 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 and nothing leaves their network. How did you guys get to YC? Like, in terms of the place? Yeah, what's the backstory? You want to go? 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 in here we are now. There's a story.

Always a show up. There's 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, seven customers now. So we are, yeah, it's going well. We're increasing over 30% week on week actually. There we go. We go. We can wait. Just do that for the next like a thousand weeks.

We get to go hopefully, yeah. Never need to raise again. Nice, has fundraising going. you guys in the midst of it. Yeah, we're about 40% there, 40, 50% there. So we're getting, we're getting close. Hopefully. Yeah. What is just you on the team right now? Do you have anyone else? Okay. Keep it that way for a while or you think you'll, you'll start really scaling up. I mean, we are thinking of getting people on board, but yeah, we want to make it, we want to keep it lean. We're trying to automate documentation. So yeah, you got to live it.

That's great. Well, thank you so much for coming on the stream. Congratulations. Yeah, good. Thank you, 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 YC Demo Day has died down as people move across the street to lunch. Good to meet you. How you doing? What's happened? Nice to meet you.

I'm John. Nice to meet you. How are you doing? What's happening? What's happening? Big day. Keeping up. Yeah, it's a big day for us.

Yeah. How the pitch go? We're going to be in the afternoon. Okay, in the afternoon. How are the nerves? Honestly, we are used. Yeah, because we are used. Alumni, 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 do you guys build me? So I'm Francesco, the founder of Kua. 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. 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 keep people with them? We wrap an entire operating system on an isolated environment, kind of like a Docker for users. Okay. And that means that we can use system level events for injecting these commands like click type and really any bash or PowerShell commands. Yeah. And then what's working in computer reuse right now? There's 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 to parts really. You don't part any of that. We just like use screenshot. Yeah. Screenshot and pixel based on this model for that. And it's also been proven by resource that's working way better than interact. What categories of agents are you guys seeing the most, you know, having the most excitement around traction? I think anytime you're building a gentic infrastructure, you got to 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 have I haven't chased any verticals, meaning that... You haven't chased any verticals yet. Any verticals, meaning that we really like the infrastructure. Yeah, exactly. Because like actually we, first month in WAC, we were getting the most esoteric ask from the users in terms of,

hey, I have these bunch of contractors. There are simply three mean videos on video editing software on Mac OS. Can I use Kua for that? Sure. And like really we couldn't converge to like very common workflows. And that's why companies that are our customers are chasing those verticals for us. Okay. Do you see the market fragmenting? Do you think you will find a vertical in niche down or do you want it all?

Honestly, we want it all. Okay. That's good. 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 chat-gbt moment. Maybe for browser to use AI 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 these isolated environment. Because like our leap of faith is that 5 years from now, most of the AI agent, a multi-agent system, we rely on API, maybe 80% of the scenarios, and the other 20% are going to be based on browser and computer as tools. What were you guys doing before this? I was working on Microsoft for over five years. Oh, cool. Awesome, I was a notion and I beat also a few startups in the past.

Nice. Are you guys Italian? We are Italian. Why did you come to the US? Three months ago now? Three months ago, four YC. Yeah, first time. Crazy. Yeah.

Has it been living up to expectations? Yeah, definitely. People ask me... Ferrari or Lamborghini. Yeah. People ask me, how is I 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. Yeah, for me, maybe since I was 16 and I'm 26 now. So it's been a long dream for me. It's remarkable. Still, like, I don't know if it's reality or not. Living a dream. What's the go-to-market been like?

So they 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. Yeah. 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 head. Please go and start out of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You head over to GitHub right now. Give it another star. Yeah, try Kua.

That's amazing. Slash Kua. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, well, what's the monetization strategy around that? OpenSports project. Yeah, so we, like for Smoking and YC, we were all these customer inbound that were basically asking us how do I even production eyes on a computer user agents 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, but what's going to happen also for us, we're going to become an LM inference provider for this computer. user models because maybe the public sense is that there are only two computer using eye models maybe one from opening eye and anthropic and that's only because they have a better PR office than other models but honestly like even on Aging phase you'll find model from by dense UI tarts 1.5 that's also out beating opening eye and Anthropic on computer use benchmarks

on computer benchmarks like OSword 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 platform where... Yeah, how good are the e-vals 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 in Microsoft doing about for computer users. On a benchmark called Windows Agentina,

which is derived from OS Word. Really like this benchmark, the, like tasks are not very meaningful. Like, for this, you will find tasks like, hey, can you go and open VLC and add subtitles? with using VLC anymore. So that's a question. Even like using Libre Office instead of like Office or even Google Docs. Yeah.

So what's going to happen my leap of faith here is that the next generational benchmark will measure like real work tasker. 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 Wiki race where. where you have like a Wiki race. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Even like you have a guy. No.

Okay, so WikiRase 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 is Columbus. And so 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 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, yeah. And also, like, this whole problem, okay, I have this workflow and now is working maybe 80% of the time. I'll 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 and you have automation for workflows that are very deterministic. And then say that you have a deviation from one trajectory due to noise or changing on a web page. Then that's when you use like full computer use. What it really makes sense. Any other Italian YC founders? We haven't met many. Are you guys hometown heroes back in the Italian tech team? You got to go do the local press.

Yeah, do the press. Delian does this. Bulgaria. It's like a celebrity over there. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. You know, there is a Y-Skiy WhatsApp group now.

Okay. They're ranging like these, um, weak on the mountains. Oh, yeah, yeah. WISC, they call it? WISC. That's reason enough alone to apply to Y-Combinate. Yeah, yeah. But then WISC.

Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, thank you so much. Congratulations. Good to be seeing you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks 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 are you doing? Oh, you got the hat on it. Oh, shit.

Oh, my gosh. Let's go, baby. shots fired. Let's go. I can't believe. We've been doing that when we hear like big numbers, big ARs. You didn't bring the gong.

Should I, so I was a white commentator summer 14 company. Yeah, that's right. Do you want me to go through my summer 14? Please give us the pitch. So hi, everyone. My name is Delian Esperohal. 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 cursor for autism. I was about to say 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. If I had some in me already, it got to amplify. How did your demo day go? Did you raise? Like, what was it hard to raise back then? It feels like everyone here can put together a million dollar seat around pretty easily? What was like the comp that you use?

A lot of Y.C. companies obviously like to give some type of, you know, anderle for dog walking. Yeah, and like summer 14, like you have to remember, like, at the time, it's not like there was a ton of, like, healthcare SaaS things that it worked. It's like you had like Epic as, like an EMR that obviously done super well.

No one really knows epic, the story fully. Yeah, and like we weren't really an EMR. So honestly, I think like, you know, I remember like Samma, you know, at the time because he was like the head of YC back then, you know, two weeks before Domodebis he told me like, your pitch is fucking trash. And then I went and, you know,

I'm gonna say this on live stream, but yeah, I took some psychedelics on a weekend and like, you know, really thought about my pitch, you know, for that weekend, made a lot of improvements. And then Sam, afterwards told me he was like, you know, relative to where your company's at and like performance,

phenomenal presentation. Wow. But phenomenal presentation. in 2014 turned into like 600 K seed round. That was a fucking grind. It was like two months after demo day like you know doing individual calls. And it's like when you look at like the amount of capital that's like you know whatever like the next door building. There was 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 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... If you were just given 10 grand to like every batch member with you, you would have a billion dollars now. Yeah, I think summer 14 did have some hits. And I have to go back and remember who's the biggest for. My batch had a ton. Coinbase, Instacart.

That was a gap year. Yeah, it was a good batch. Yeah. A bunch of good ones. But yeah, it's like 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 they're like, honestly, just like didn't lead to any investments.

And so I was like at some point, what am I, you know, sort of. doing here. That obviously COVID really killed it off. And so excited to be back, but it's also an interesting just like marker of like the like the industries, you know, sort of maturity of just like the amount of companies, what the companies are working on. Now also the amount of comps that like you can like look at like in 2014 if you had said like my comp is like I would like to be a hundred billion dollar publicly traded company. It's like, okay, there's like basically like two of those in the entire history of technology. Now you have to come because people are doing Varda for X.

Yeah. You got to be a lot. There was an Indian Varda. So you know, got to track those guys down and figure out how to like acquire them so we have like a DESEVarda. Yeah. That's great. 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 would all like literally like, you know, we talk about this like ever at my former colleague. He's just like, oh, like if anything is like, you know, negative gross margins and like highly capex intensive send a deli. And he, like, said that as a joke.

Yeah. And then now everybody's realizing, like, actually, KAPX intensity is, like, the best mode ever. Because, like, if you just build software, AI slop can, you know, replicate it basically overnight. So, yeah, I definitely looked at it, you know, shameful of them. I think it's cool to see that, like, like, YC's leaning into this because it's not something that they've, you know, sort of...

They had a couple hard runs with, like, Pebble was a bit, 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? But at the same time, like, there's been now, like, Astronis and Oaklo and, like, a few really, even harder tech companies that have made it through and like scaled. So, uh,

astronomy is like the best like, like, like, you know, sort of trading, but like, you know, hard to figure out. Yeah,

hard to figure out. But, but still, it's like, it's like, it's got some, you know, sort of real. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It's like, yeah. Yeah. It's like, yeah, yeah. It's like, like, I mean, if you look at, like,

you know, the like YC deep tech, you know, sort of portfolio and like hit rate and outcomes relative to like the FF or Delian seed deep tech industrial portfolio. Yeah. There's definitely one that I would want to buy in the basket of and one that I wouldn't. And so, you know, I, uh, I mean, maybe I shouldn't be speaking. Maybe Gary's going to fucking kick me out. I mean, I, I think like the bull case is 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 that actually part of the ecosystem. And yes, like, you're going to 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 aquihers. It opens the Overton window for like the average day of grads and like not just work on AI Slop. How many multi-stage VCs have pulled back from 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 like, you know, sort of 2019, it was like the consensus thing. Like at some point, like 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, you know, maybe Gary's going to keep 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 awards basis. It's not like the companies are going to die. Oh, yeah. There's so many. There's so many like YC specific funds that would come in and just write 100 K 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, like the game theory is like if I'm the only one pitching before Demo Day, I get all the interest. And so there's still like, I'm sure, like, you will, 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, like, a lot of the, like, you know, should companies have already closed their rounds by, like, the time this day happens, which was very much, though, not the case in 2014. 2014 was like, oh, yeah. Maybe one company, the entire batch.

Yeah, yeah. And by the way, for what it's worth, like, if you study those, like, early batches, there was basically, like, an extreme negative correlation between, like, the ones that like, you know, sort of raised early and it actually ended up being like the like, you know, sort of batch returning, you know, sort of 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 like kind of ramped revenue by like saying like, yeah, well, we'll produce a video for $100,000. Like that's not really like durable, scalable revenue. It was clearly before clearly. It was clearly that made the viral deal. And they raised a $60 million round at before Demo Day. And everyone was like, what's going? God.

The coin is sitting there at eight. Did you see that ad? It was a company called CoTool. They did like a skit based on the deal, Rippling thing. No way. Yeah. It was a prank on it because they do.

You got to see this video. It's hilarious. But they're in this batch. Yeah. Yeah. They have a, they have a service that will monitor Slack or chats for honey pots and create honey pots for you and do all this different cybersecurity stuff.

It's great. I mean, I think back on like, I just had this memory from 2017 when I was at Coastal Ventures where like, you know, Veno to 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, 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 R. It was alpha. Nobody else was doing it, et cetera. And then literally it's like like you said there. Now there's like these infinite, you know, sort of YC funds where like I actually just feel like

the alpha there on like doing the prework, 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 like something like this exists, like the idea in 2014 that there'd be like a live show that anybody would get to talk about and actually want to tune into you to talk to YC company. It's like, we could barely get anybody like, you know, pay attention to any of us, let alone the idea that there's like whatever going to be like 15,000 people on Twitter. So yeah, I mean, this entire industry has just gotten like, you know, I mean, like this is, we are like the new Wall Street. It's like kids grow up,

you know, in like 2008 being like I want to be like an investment banker. Yeah, the kid right here just said it. I knew I wanted to join YC when I was 16. and it was 26 now. So it's like decade. I mean, we talked about this in relation to the like Teal Fellowship recently where it's like in 2012, the like off track thing to do was to like drop out, build a company, join an accelerator,

work in technology. Now this is the track. And so we like need to practically find. There's a high school dropout in this batch. Yeah, yeah. I mean, at this point like the- 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 just not even going to college at all. is the new dropping out. It's like just the default. It's just the default. Versus like in my year at MIT,

remember there's like three of us that dropped out. Yeah. It was like a big deal. The key is apply to college, get accepted. Yes.

And then don't. Yeah. Be like MIT acceptee, but that's all the end. I had a whole riff on this. It's like, yeah, Delian, you dropped out of MIT.

I knew that I would drop out if I went there so I didn't even apply. Yeah. Exactly. I didn't go to a different college. But it's just like,

yeah, yeah, you're a sucker for even haven't gone for a day. You paid the application. You paid the application. You paid a full year of tuition. God damn. Boomer.

Boomer mode. 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 stuff. We got some big news. A new investment from you coming on.

Oh, yeah. We'll see you. We'll see you. Back to back days. Welcome to the demo day stream. What's going on? What's going to meet you? How are you doing?

I'm John. Nice to meet Dave. Dave Munichello. Is it, did you photograph us out there? Was that somebody else at GV? No, I didn't photograph you. Why, who was photographing? Someone else at GV. Hawn.

Okay. He took a picture. Put us on the time. That was okay. Oh yeah. We love the paparazzi. It was good. Can you introduce yourself for the stream?

Yeah, so Dave Munichello, Google Ventures, a managing partner there. I've been there about 13 years. Yeah. Investing in AI and enterprise software from the early days. Lots of ton of YC companies. Yeah.

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. Amazing. Thanks for going on. I'm here. I'm here. I'm 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 invested in companies at this point, maybe not on right around demo day, but in every batch. I was in Cambridge in the early days in grad school when like Paul Graham and those folks were in Cambridge doing their thing. At that point in time, YC was like the cool place to be connected to. Totally.

And I think, you know, a lot of us, I met, you know, 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 is totally evolved. Oh, totally. It's a machine. Multiple chapters.

Totally. It was fortunate enough to do GitLab in the early days. So like New Dolton 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, and 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 stepped out to do the earnings call with the CEO and the CFO to like do the investor call back because they're public market shareholders of the company. Oh, wow. So we invested just after the series B. We actually passed on the series B. Oh, no way. And we had a bunch of concerns.

And if I look at those concerns, they were... Hold the mic a little bit closer or just angle it. Sorry. Yeah, yeah. They were one of the first companies to be remote only. Oh, yeah, that was the thing. And GitLab.

Yeah. We're like, this remote only thing seems strange. How are they going to run a company like this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. 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 passed, but he still had you in. I mean, we talked constantly. Like passing out of company, it's just like, it's just like this stage isn't right for us, but we want to continue to talk to you over time, right? What's your approach to demo date 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 before demo-day. You are writing checks even at this early stage. We write checks into YC companies. We love YC companies. Amazing. So even though we're multi-stage, like, hundred million dollars into a public company, so we're just talking about. We also do seed and everything in between.

A is our sweet spot, A's and B's. Great. We do 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 like constantly ping 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 raise capital from Google. There are sole LP. It's an LP relationship. Yeah, because it says an interesting dynamic because on the one hand, that could be incredible value at. It is 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 years. Yep. And plenty of capital. 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. It's like 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. Yeah. So I shared the like I was in Cambridge. 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 a hundred 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, you know, dynamic. I mean, I talked to obviously tons of friends in at the GP level across. different firms. It does keep them sharp. Like they get a lot of pressure from LPs, constant questions, deal flow, connectivity. I think that's really positive. Yeah. But we don't have to deal with a lot of that stuff. And so we spend time connecting with founders and other GPs.

Yeah. 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. Yeah. I haven't really saw on that side. You know what's a weird? So LPs. So what's this transformers thing? I didn't want to say it, but I think that's kind of I've seen that. I've seen the movie, but I mentioned this idea of like we invested in, you know, Kate Live in the early days and then now they're a public company. Like hedge funds invest in the stock. Sure.

They 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. It's like 90 days. Maybe like you know, 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. So we don't have the conversation about like what we're in, what we're not in. Do you have a generational founders? Do you have a particular understanding of how the startup landscape is interfacing with the Mag 7, the big tech companies right now? We're in an interesting time. The big tech companies, they all kind of like went from $100 billion in market cap to a trillion very easily.

And 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 starting. than ever, but the big companies have more resources than ever. What are you talking to founders about? Specifically around AI, we're wondering constantly, like, is AI going to make incumbents stronger? Yes, it seems like a sustaining innovation. Totally. And yet, I'm 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 acquire,

acquire AI? Yeah, we're seeing this with the Winsuit. Do you have every big tech? company need a investment. It's a new hot structure. That's the new, yeah, it's the new M&A. 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 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 difference. Add a zero to it. I would like more big tech companies. We're on the side of the. Big tech and so we we we we we we want there to be as much big tech as possible. I mean this is actually little tech the 70 would be little tech growing into the we're we're we're fans of it all of it just all of it just high tech tech yeah yeah yeah I think this idea that like people want to make people want to say AI is good for big tech or it's an extending innovation but

it can be good for both right it can be so transformative like the internet was good for some big companies that adapted well to it so 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. And so now they're, they're building, you know, I met a company out there that was like one person, no engineers, already have tons of revenue. Like I think that, yeah, he told me it's going to be the first

billion dollar company. Oh, he's going for it. I always get hung up on that because it's like if you attach, if you attach yourself. It's a vanity metric. It's a total, I mean, it'll be amazing when it happens, but a total vanity metric that can like guide you towards bad decision making. It feels like it might like happen accidentally. Yeah, yeah. Happens accidentally.

It shouldn't be something that's maybe delivered up. Or the way to do it is get your 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. That's not how we build the company. We bought a 10,000 person company and we've found. fired everyone except for one person. There are a few VC companies right now looking at VC firms that are looking at,

you know, the PE roll up. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Something that has massive distribution. Have you looked at them? We have passed on a lot of them. I think it feels like a PE play where you're trying to like get the multiple to change as a

result of the industry being going after. It's all the question of how big the, I just look at it's like a lot of the founders that are running that strategy, they just should change the structure and just say like we're going to run a PE playbook here and we're going to be two and 20. We're going to be two and 20. Yeah. Because if you can raise 20 million on 100 for the strategy and keep a lot of the economics,

sure, it's great for the team, but it should probably be like basically the comp incentive structure should be look more like probably. Totally fair. Yeah. You guys are friends with the buddy of mine, Sean McGuire's been on here a couple of times. Sean introduced me to a founder on Friday night at like nine o'clock over text and I respond back and the guy's like, do you want to meet tonight? Nice.

Do you want to be tomorrow morning? Like I'll come to you. I live like an hour away. drive to you. I'm like that that kind of high agency humans can be empowered by you know an entire set of tools a software suite you know AI AI will be the thing that powers all of these incredible humans that we're sort of meeting today for sure yeah the thing I mean I hope we get some more these companies on we've had a lot of developer tool uh teams on uh 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 you know with like LLMs like you know chat GPT then you have you know code gen as like big revenue categories and like this third category of just actual like business automation so like how do you just make the machine work yeah and everybody's thinking about it in the concept of like agents which is like kind of a I think like almost a simplistic way to to view these things and like what what is the next what is the next iteration of that where it's like actually like an autonomous system that yeah 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 Harvey is a legal AI company that we're invested in yeah there's some medical AI company so like every vertical has AI 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 cross functionally yeah how do you worry when a YC deal that you're looking at gets gets gets hot, do you worry? You think it's a cat. Oh, we don't worry at all.

No, I think that, you know, but I mean, historically, you know, I think if you do look at the data, a lot of these companies, that some of the hotter companies at Demo Day don't end up, you know, always. I mean, we're investing in super hot companies at the A and the B,

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. Yeah. And so, like, you have to,

if you're, 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 challenges that you have like three months of data. Yeah. And so you're talking to a company. 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 going to grow revenue the fastest over two years, three years. We've seen that a bunch of times. We'll reinvest in a YC company and then after demo day, it kind of, it kind of chills out a little bit. Yeah. And then it re-accelerates. There's a founder in this batch. Yeah, totally.

Founder in this batch that raised, I think, like, almost $8 million of uncapped convertible notes. Right? And so it's just like humans. Dog, an absolute dog. He's an incredible. He's an incredible founder's an incredible team. And like I understand why people are sort of leaning in to working 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 like, you know, trying to explain, like, you know, entering a party round on an uncapped note. but it's easy to justify if it works out. RLP literally has no visibility. Yeah, sure. That's good. So maybe it's easier for you. 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 for them 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. Yes. And you could say, you know, we're good with our ownership right now and like we're going to help you raise this round. but we actually, like I think this concept of like signaling risk is like totally possible for you to want to invest in a company today and three years from now. So like just because you don't do the in between rounds or specific ground. This is the exact conversation I was having when Gary walked up and said, hey, you should talk to these guys.

So I was talking to Neeraj from General Catalyst. Oh yeah. And we were chatting about like, do you play when the price gets to an uncomfortable place? What signals does 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 going to 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. Yeah.

We talk to 30 or 40. We might do a handful. Yeah, that makes sense. Very cool. Well, thank you so much for having. You're welcome on that show. Great to help you. Take care.

Good to meet. And we are ready for our next team or individual or investor or ypper. Who will it be? Who 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.

Hi. You're looking around for the camera. You are on 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 the hat. I'm John.

John, what's up, Andrew, Jordi. How are you guys? Introduce yourself. Hi, my name's Andrew Lee. I'm a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Fantastic. Both working in the Games Fund and also at A16 Z Speed Run. Very cool.

Are there any games companies here today? There are no game companies here, which is somewhat sad. Is they just you suck them all into Speed Run? Is that your fault? There's about four or five of them. I think for YC, there's about four or five consumers or companies, which are pretty good. So you can look at those. For sure.

Four or five in the whole batch. I mean, there's like five to six-ish. But here's the good thing. I mean, like, there were a couple companies who previously in the past were like B2B companies. They're like, you know what? It's really boring. I don't want to do this.

And a number of them like ended up in gaming and they ended up in entertainment. So that was exciting. And then also I just generally think that like if you're going to build something that's that, you know, your mom or your, your 17-year-old D-gen friend is going to go ahead and play, then, yeah, you know, it makes sense for them

to go ahead and build B-to-B stuff as well. Yeah. I want to 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. You're like getting on a plane to Sweden and you're like... By the time you get there, they've doubled air or are. Yeah, yeah.

Like there was this Balatro game that was like 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 flashes of pan games that become very viral.

but I don't understand if they're 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 going to be pretty sticky. Whereas, like, Bellatro, I don't know, it seems like local funk, I think his name is, fantastic developer.

But who knows if that's, like, a, you're going to turn into, like, Activision? I think fundamentally for us, the way that we tend to think about it is there's like 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 legal legends if you're all out there. If you're trying to create like a moba that sort of makes sense. Sure. But I think that for us, honestly, the big wave we see is in the world of AI. Sure.

Whether it's like changes in 3D animation, we fundamentally think that the future of entertainment is actually going to be, there's going to be an AI Pixar. Mark my words, someone's going to 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. A actual Pixar. Exactly. It's going to make like the next thing or potentially take the next wave. But I don't know if you guys seen any of these Vio videos.

Oh, incredible. I mean, the Bible bros, the whatever, like Stormtroopers walking all over the place. I'm like, it's astounding. And it's and I don't think that's something that could ever occur. There's like a sort of innovator's dilemma that's occurring with the existing folks. So even just from like a PR pressure, like, I don't know if you saw 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 cares 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 marketing, 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. Yeah, yeah. And is the Roblox of AI Roblox or is it something, you know, 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 web through 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, like, invest in any consumer companies lately. It's hard. It's hard. It's hard because there's a reason why every DDC 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 like the platform for folks who want to build games is not nearly as liquid as it possibly could be.

Sure. So as a result, I think the thing is the one thing that I think we've seen that's a very positive out there. Liquid as in there's not enough demand coming from Steam itself. Or really that like your ability to get more bang for buck, right? that it's fast enough that you don't have to pay a huge amount of marketing spend. It's gone a lot tougher and you should have to be very good at it. So there's great teams that are able to do that. There's a lot of gaming going on there too with like wish listing, driving early sales.

And so you're paying people to wish list your product. And it's like there's kind of schemes on top of schemes. Right, right. And the thing is like we could do it. I mean, like 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'm sure we're all familiar with Mid Journey.

That was built, it's built on Discord. Yeah, yeah, 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 Vio 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 hundred and twenty thousand 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 that's 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. Sure. But I don't know. Who am I don't know. Are you seeing enough are you seeing enough weird stuff, right? Like there's this concept of like, you know, kind of trying to leverage AI in the sort of existing paradigm, but when you think about the intersection of like tech and AI and entertainment 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 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 think we can build the next candy crush. Yeah, I think a lot of, well, for us as a fun, we'd want to obviously have people who were going to 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 of what's possible. Because otherwise, then what you're doing is you're most likely just like basically doing a Me Too,

which is then 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, right? 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 a thing called Fortnite and then 20 people have to kill each other and then it 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 and that's kind of interesting. Yeah. 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 BDB infrastructure

that allows you, 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 Infra 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 Andrewson 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 going to be the one to build the next great consumer game? Maybe, maybe it's built on top of their platform. What are you seeing in VR? Oh, yeah. In VR, let's see here.

So there is one great company that came through before from Speed Room in the past. And around the first one was this company called Trask 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?

And it's crazy. Like, they all go home, they just play VR a lot. Yeah. And they have to obviously have the device installed. Yeah, of course. But for them, they spend a lot of time there. So we backed this team that was like a bunch of. 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 um is taking one of the bigger ones uh attacking one of the bigger ones which is gorilla tag they made a game um uh that is is astounding uh their their their their most recent game actually uh um it's called yeaps um i i can't describe because i'm too old um but basically it's like you know we're all in a world together and we get to go and do stuff together um but then we all collect yeaps we We yip at each other. Okay. And it's like,

re-ieping. Yeah, we're yiping. It's all the yeaps. All the shouts, all the yeaps out there. 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, you know, what VR and the general install base. I think, I still think that like VR still needs like a shot to the arm in terms of,

you know, we all know this, that it probably needs more installs. It probably needs a final way there, but it needs like a lower turn relative to the device sales. That's right. That's right. 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-rayban glasses potentially, right? We need VR games that are truly addicting, not just novel. Yeah. Yeah, I was really hoping for the first. You probably shouldn't. I mean, I remember. I like Eves, though.

And the kids love it too. With the original, like, PlayStation, like, Metal Gear Solid, that game was like 100 hours or like Final Fantasy 7. That was like 100-hour experience. GTA 4. Yeah. That was like 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 more like, okay, it's a cool demo.

I said 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 going to innovate in the world of entertainment to innovate on that B2B layer, which is where we're seeing it. We're seeing a bunch of AI sort of video creation tools. We had one company, Hedra who came through, who was honestly just astounding when the Studio Ghibli sort of content started exploding.

People were like, well, how can I animate the Studio Ghibli content? And then everyone was using Hidra 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?

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 AI side. And I think that will then drive a lot of innovation, which then gets you the 10x here.

And hopefully if 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. Of course. Come back on to you guys. Come on when there's big game news. Of course, of course.

Games correspond. I'm going to take this hat. Please do it. Enjoy it. All right. See you guys. Let's bring in the next. the next person.

This guy is actually eating data. We're at YSIDDAO, 2025. Eat data. Make chongs. Welcome to the stream. I'm John. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.

Can you introduce yourself? My name is Shreash. I am the co-founder of Chunky. Chunky. Chonky. Yeah. Junkie. What do you do?

We take really complex documents. We split them up into meaningful pieces such that one piece as one idea. Okay. And then we send your LLM only the data needs to answer a question. Give me an example of a really complicated document. Financial reports. Okay. You've got graphs.

You've got. text data paragraphs, you've got tables. And 10 days 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, one million tokens or something and then just ask it, what's going on there? It'll work with like maybe one PDF, but you have a whole database of PDFs. You've got 100-page PDF, thousands of those, 10, thousands of those. You've got schematics, which are really complex. models get confused. We actually ran this e-val yesterday after the price drop on 03, which is we took relatively simple documents.

We took classic literature, you know, David Copperfield, labor, everything like that. And we gave that to 03. We asked very pointed questions. O3 got a retrieval accuracy of 75%. Okay. Great. We chunked the data through Chonky.

Then we asked the other through the same thing. Always chung. Always chon. 100%. This is my favorite name since last YC batch, which was a company called Pig. I'm sending a trend here. You just like, large animals.

I mean, it's just, it's going to stick. We're going to be talking about this next demo day. Talk about the pipeline. I have a bunch of huge PDFs on S3 or something. I feed it into your system. Am I getting a Postgres table? Am I getting a MongoDB, like unstructured, you know, Jason?

Am I getting embeddings? Yes. So it's like a vector database? Yeah, so you get embeddings out there you can put it on your own vector database. Oh, okay. And we can also wrap around your vector database. That's slowly up to you. It's 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 source. Yes, we have an open course strategy. Okay, interesting. And so we are open source first. We started as a side project on the open source, and we love the open source.

So is this something that I should be running in like an unjust process as I'm generating new large documents, I'm chonking them, and then loading them into my vector database, which I may be also hosting on ADS. You can async chonk, but if you're building a code gen tool, then you want a live chonk. Okay, live chon. Yeah.

And so if you're doing like cogen on the fly or if you're like, you know, things, if you're working with a corpus that's changing all the time, then you do 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 like February. Yeah. And we came into BIC with this idea. How many people on the scene? It's just me and my friend from seventh grade. I'm saying. So, that's a lot of true.

So many. It's the boys group chat made it out of the group chat and then we're not in a C. Give us some statistics. How many chunks have you chunked? How many stars do you have on GitHub? How much revenue you make? And what do you get for us? Oh, boy.

On the quantitative metric 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 a core dependency on projects like Lama Index. Oh, cool. And we've got like 10 to 12 batch companies using us.

Cool. Good inbound 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. Preliminary. Yes. Just weighing our options and just like making sure by Friday will be done. That's amazing. Amazing. Well, good luck out there. Oh, thank you so much.

Thank you for having me. Never stop tron. Never stop chonking. We'll be following here. What's the domain? C-H-O-N-K-I-E dot AI. And if you want this merch, it's shop. Dotchon-J-R-E-R-E.

He's selling merch. He's selling merch. Let's bring in the N-R-M-S-M-L-M-S-E. Awesome. Great to meet you. The next participant of the demo day stream. If we have one, we got Goelma. Welcome to Demo Day 2025. We are live from White Combinator in San Francisco. What's going on? Nice to meet you. I'm John. I'm Cinnamon. I'm Cinnamon. Nice to meet you. Hi, Hi, I'm John. Oh, I'm good. Nice to meet you. Can you introduce yourselves? Yeah, I'm a mechanical engineer by background. Cool. Built hardware for Apple, Google, Slack. Wow.

Yeah, hardware. Hardware. Hardware for Slack. Well, yeah. What do they have? RFX way, oh, sorry, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Oh, that. Not SLOC, not SLOC, K. Okay, that would be more sense. What hardware device did I guess? Good, clarified, yeah. Cool, awesome.

So I'm Abujit. I worked as a researcher at Stanford. 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.

And then tell us what your company does. Yeah, so we're Godella. We're building a frontier physics model for mechanical engineers. Okay. So currently, AIM models can't handle physics accurately because a lot of them are language-based. Yes. 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.

Yeah, they like to bring up this idea of solving these problems and 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? 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 about that? Yeah, so we don't use reinforcement learning or anything. It's basically like this sort of like encoding framework, where we actually take the mesh itself. Like we work with meshes, right? Because we're like in simulation and stuff.

So we take the fluid mesh and then we like encode into like this low dimensional space and that allows to learn the actual physics of the system. Interesting. And when you do symbolic regression on like the latent space, you get like a lot of, you know, like, you get a lot more generalizability than you would get with like regular models. Okay.

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 teeing a computational mechanics class together at Sanford, which was teaching undergrads in mechanical engineering how to use the traditional simulation software. Yes.

Kind of bred a hatred for those software. Meanwhile, I was just doing insane research at Stanford to use ML to model the physical world in this crazy accurate ways. He's like building ML models for Intel that are replacing months of trial in there and their plasma edge process. And I realize 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 a I have an engine and I'm trying to simulate how they. 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? 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 your 3D model. You want to know how is, what does drag? With the drag. Yeah, exactly.

How is that going to change as I change thickness or angle of attack of my air flow? 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. And we say instantly it's 4,500 times faster than a benchmarked GPU accelerated solver that we tested against. Wow. Wow.

Okay. Very cool. What's the go to 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, we can 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 a product. And they can probably, like, reality check your faster results with the traditional system that they have in place, whenever they need to or run that overnight. Instead of while you're lot of traction selling it so far. It's been great.

So we launched two weeks ago. We entered a 25K year contract with an engineering firm, to replace ANSIS, which is $30 billion incumbent. However, I think our stronger pool 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?

Like there is no great simulator that gives you that fast, accurate answers, even though it's governed by... The solution software gets like 70 person accuracy or something. Yeah. Yeah. And it's also very slow though. Yeah, exactly. It's like 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.

It's great. Well, it's very exciting. We're just, yeah, yeah, yeah. Amazing. It's very busy. Whoever's like, you know, bidding, I'm sure they're going to watch this. Congratulations.

It's 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. Thanks to see you. Congratulations. We will talk to you soon.

Let's bring in the next team or whoever it is and don't forget to go to vanta.com, adio.com, numeralhq.com, Aidsleep.com, Wanda. Go to every website right now. 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 meet you. Welcome to the show. Can you introduce yourself for the stream? I'm Linus. Linesis. Pleasure. It is a pleasure. Is that you 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 Dan. Okay, what is Dan? Dan is cursive for knowledge workers. Okay, so 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. Okay, so I'm not in Slack at all.

I'm just in Den when I'm doing knowledge work. Okay. What is the typical knowledge worker, like, experience with Slack? Because I feel like there's a lot of just, like, 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, ultimately, but no actions. Yep. With Den, we're all about actions, and we work backwards from, you know, what you know, need to get the task done. So give me an example. Yeah, so I guess in Slack, you would be asking, you know, your co-worker for how many,

how many users signed up last month? That's going to be like an async process where like, literally just happened in the Slack in one of my Slack I'm in. It was like, are we reviewing last week's numbers or the week before or 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 going to pick that up. So, you know, we're all about like that multiplayer aspect. Your inputs are building the agents and kind of configuring your tools and configuring the tasks. And then we kind of provide like the multiplayer environment where you might be orchestrating like thousands of AI agents. Yeah. Talk about the path of AI agents, long running agents. We have this idea of like 10 minute AGI, 20 minute AGI, O3 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. Yeah, we break it down into three things. Like you've got your ad hoc tasks. Yep. You've got your crime job task, your scheduled tasks. And then 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 to communicate. The AIs 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 a notion. And so we wanted to bring the agents to way 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 have to build it from the ground up for agents in that way. Do you think we'll still call ourselves knowledge workers in 10 years if knowledge is instantly accessible by all machines? Taste workers.

There will be taste workers and 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 knows? 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 like 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. Maybe there's some use cases. Maybe they don't want to 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 of workflow. But I think it's going to slowly move down, like, the stack. I spoke with Shalto Douglas, who is a researcher at N. Yeah. We had them on the show recently. We have great, like, coding agents and kind of math agents,

because research is like math and coding. Interesting. But, you know, people are. It's not just the verifiable reward thing? It's that as well. Okay. It's that as well. Yeah.

I think we're kind of building in the infrastructure. that's going to allow those iterations to happen, where you do actually get 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. And I think the verifiability will come. It's just...

Interesting. How's the traction been? What's the rollout? What's the go-to-market is handing out 500 business cards to everyone at Demo Day. So you want every company here, all the small startups, the early-stage companies, that feels easier than ripping out

some massive Slack installation. Right. Exactly. We take a lot of inspiration. Start with Den, stay with Den forever. Got it. Exactly. Okay. Seat-based pricing? Yes. Interesting. Agent-based pricing? Yeah, do the agents have to pay? What about the thousand agents? Okay. So the one-person company, you're cooked. Exactly. Good luck, though. You'll figure it out. I'm sure. I'm sure it'll be fine. Nice. 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 God. That's good. Congratulations. Thank you. No, I started this three months ago now. So it's been awesome.

Very cool. Three months right before I see. 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 500,000 ARA 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. Wow. Fantastic.

Thanks so much for hopping on the stream. This was fantastic. Good luck, guys. All right. 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? Very nice to meet you. I'm Joche. 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 Tucci. I'm the CEO of Eloquent AI. 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. Okay. 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 Q, right? It might take up to two weeks to open a new business account. Happens all the time. So we solve that problem. Rather than that going to support team,

it comes to our dedicated AI operator. Sure. Our AI operator takes on the job, and here's 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 of both? 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. Sure. But, you know, we leverage 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.

You know, things have changed. We are finding it actually we reached half a million ARR in four weeks. Congratulations! I love that. Congratulations. And the reason is because I think all these banks now have the mandate. Wait, did you say 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. Because as I was saying, things changed in the financial industry. They want to bring this cutting edge AI in-house as quick as possible.

That's amazing. Very cool. Has Y.C been? Honestly, in any metric, it massively exceeded my experience. That's amazing. That's amazing. I'm a second time founder. Okay. 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. 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 it's a big one we close the seat around everyone I love the I love the spirit here that's amazing that's so great that's still surprises me every time it's amazing every yeah it does it does surprise me I love it and yeah we close the seat around And 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. 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. That's amazing.

Well, thank you so much for coming. Thank you so much. Very nice to reach you. Take care. Let's bring in the next guests. We are live from YCDemaday, 2025. Book of Wander, find your happy place. Find your happy place.

Bring a ball in. Go to Wander.com. Hey, guys. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? 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 so many and I'm a chute and we're building you learn. It's an AI tutor for students. Very cool. What's the go-to-market? I tried to build an ed tech company back in 2012. That was actually the first company I applied to Y-C-4.

It was a disaster. It was extremely hard. Never really made a job. dime off of it. They got like 500 installs on the iOS app I built. Let's give it up for 500. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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. Yeah. We have over 200,000 students active on our website. There we go. A thousand more than what I got during my wife's you, thank you. Thank you.

You guys can keep talking. Okay. 200,000. We love it. So, well, what is the channel? Let me guess. You got a bunch of TikToks. Yeah.

Okay. Instagram, TikTok. We have, I think, over 500,000 followers on Instagram. That's amazing. And how long you'll take to build that up? We, 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 learning material, like, textbooks, and we give them, like, concise notes. Sure. Like, you can have a conversation with an AI tutor as well.

Like, you can have quizzes, you can create exams, all the study tools. You create, like, podcasts based on... Yeah, so right now it's a conversational experience. You want to make it, like, more proactive. Yeah, yeah, so you can listen. Yeah, I remember... And are you getting to 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?

Where's the option to be strongest? Yeah, so undergrads are, like, number one right now, and then it's higher to 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 premium subscription. It's free for, like, a limited amount of time, and then 20 bucks a month.

I have an idea of surge-based pricing, exam season. Right before exam, We actually give a discount and exam season and it worked really well. It worked very well. Even post exam, like there's always a summer sale. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it just works out really well. That's amazing.

Wait, so how long have you actually been building this? I missed that. 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? Yes. Just growing everything. Yeah, so MRR is like a key metric.

Fantastic. 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. Let's go. Congratulations. Wow. I mean, honestly I got to say sorry because just say, yeah, I know, 83, what if there's one million. That's amazing. That's amazing. You're close.

Yeah, yeah. Put another sale on. Oh yeah. Go to every person in the bat. Subscribe right now. Yep. Let's get it to one mill. Let's get it to one mill. That's fantastic.

We're not going to let you leave until you get to a million of our hours. Okay, okay. You got to stay in this room, walking. Last question, obviously, tons of developments from all the foundation model labs. What's working? What's most exciting? What do you take an 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 O3 pricing drop? Are you a beneficiary of O3 Pro? 100%. Every model improvement. benefits us directly. Yeah, we want to focus on accuracy the most right now. You want to make sure everything that a student gets as accurate as possible.

Are students cooked by AI? Are you uncooking them? 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, you know, like a natural conversation. Yeah, like you leave it open on your desk when you're studying. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, you can do that. Yeah, and it can, like, create mind maps for you. It can create, like, flowcharts, you can create whatever you want. It's very cool. How are you seeing the competition? Did you guys drop out? In the process. Legally not yet.

School for you, but not for me. How are you seeing, like, the obvious competition between just, like, using ChatGBT, $20 a month, that's right at the pro tier or, like, the plus tier. There's a lot of Tyler Cowan's been writing about, I used to feed in a snippet from a book and ask chat to you about it. Now I just say, hey, summarize this book and it already knows. So you 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. a big component, but the main thing is we just asked our users, why do they use us or chat

gbtee? And they say, like we have like a feature called the quizzes and like flashcards, sure. And we create that like very accurately for them. Interesting. And what they can do is they can upload like a thousand page textbook, even 2,000 page. Someone uploaded like the entire international. Imagine how do they, how do you just fail your exam? I remember so I remember in college I had a textbook and I wanted a digital version and 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 now? Yeah, so if it's available digitally, they can upload 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 want to like partner with like e-book. That makes sense. That'd be very, very cool. Yeah, yeah. Amazing. Amazing.

Well, congratulations. Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, we'll see you later. And let's bring in the next team. Let's do lightning round. Let's speed these up, right? Speed these up. There's demand.

Is there demand out there? Okay. Hey, we only have two seats. One of you can take a knee. Oh, my God, there's sick. Army. Get in here. Come in.

Come in. Okay. Realistically, only one of you or two of you can talk. Is there only so many mics? Keep going. Do you guys move to the camera to show everyone for a second? We got a small army here. Look at this army.

Yeah, tilt over a little bit. Go to the wide. Are you guys, is this the founding team? Yeah, what's going on? All the founding team. Six founders, that world record. Who's the founding engineer? There's one guy who cuts.

There's one guy who's not cutting. Let's go. What are you building? Break it down for us. So we are building AWS for AI agents. Like, Imagine, we are 20 years ago. It was mostly infrastructure for software as a service. No AI agents are becoming like the de facto.

to new software, so we are building this infrastructure for the agents. What is important about infrastructure that needs to be different? Why would I not just deploy this on AWS? Or Microsoft. I mean, you saw Satya Nadella at Build. He was saying, like, we have model router. We have everything from Deep Seat to Lama 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 architect, cloud infrastructure experts. Sure. So a new generation of software developers, software engineers. The 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 that are using, the lifetime of the computing platform is not the same.

So serverless is one thing, traditional virtual machine in one of the same. I mean, even going back to the YC story, Heroku. Yeah, exactly. Was that story of like, yes, you could always spin out. BC2, 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. 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. company. We sold to a cloud provider, so we know how to do it. The traders hate over here. It's like Intel again. What happened? They can't retain any of you. You couldn't be bought. I see what

happened. 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? So we launched seven weeks ago. And like most of God 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 leave, we sleep. When we can sleep, yeah, but we leave in the office. Yeah, it's a lot of mouths to feed.

Have you raised money? Yeah, rounds closed? Yeah, rounds closed. Congratulations. Thank you. Congratulations. I think Johnny's got stuff for you. We're going to make them all of it.

Spray them all with it. Fantastic. Well, congratulations. much for you guys. Thank you so much for coming by. Thank you guys. Fantastic team. Look forward to following your journey. We got a great, have a great time. Thank you. Thank you. We got a good name coming in next. We got waffle. Let's bring in waffle. Waffle. Come on in to the palace party rounds. Oh yeah, they're customer. That's great.

So customer. Grab some seats. Put the microphones as close to your face as you can because we are live from YCDM. You guys are building agents for agents. 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? Or are you building on top of it? We're starting off replacing Wix. Wix. So we've just launched our AI website builder three weeks ago. We've had 700 projects built on there. Okay. And yet 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. You know, like if let's take just like outbound email marketing. Yeah. Someone could use something like MailChimp. Yeah, and that's much more expensive than how much me and Diego pay when we set up a project with Resend. Yep. Because it's a developer tool. It's super cheap.

Oh, interesting. 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. Yeah. 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, putting it to Waffle. And then just sending it to them. Sending it to them. I've seen a lot of Wix and Squarespace. You see the web, you see the ads, the Super Bowl ads, and it's always, you're 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 clothes, like if you just ask Claude 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. They have a lot of UI and they're building out their magic chat which allows you to

kind of take a UI component and have remixes of it. So they're working 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. Yes. Neither. Let's give it after unemployment. I'm kidding. You guys are founders?

Yeah, yeah. So we both did computer science. I was at Oxford. Diego was at Ecole Polytechnique, Losanne. Met up in London. Yeah. I moved in with him. And then we've just been working on Star.

We got you out of there. We got you to America. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Brain. They said it was impossible to build a company in Europe and your testament to the fact that you got to come to America.

Congratulations. Yeah. It's been insane. I was listening to you guys two days ago. Oh, really? And when the Cluley founder was on. Oh, yeah. And now we're here.

It's important to get attention, but there is a limit. That's how to message. Where's the line for you? Clearly has their line around what they're willing to do for attention. It's pretty crazy. You know, why C goes the other end of the spectrum where they're like, just don't focus on your pitch, let the numbers speak for you. And they're like, just put your graph up and that's what matters.

I think it's good. Did you have a number that you shared 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. Well, good luck. With the rest of Demiday, we have one last hat. here there might be more out there you can share that you can share that based on days there's more

hats let's give them two hats are we out of hats yeah we don't want to run okay thank you anyway congratulations awesome guys guys great teams let's bring in the next team and let's uh tell you about linear linear app used to meet my manager projects at least half the batches i think so welcome to the stream how you doing good good my hand in water i'm gonna not shake your hand to meet you uh let's start with an introduction uh who are you guys, what do you guys building? And please, microphone as close to this as possible. Yeah, I'm Daniel. Cool. And this is Musa. Cool. We're the co-founders of Vibe Grade. 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. Okay. Interesting. 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, the best integration is on Google classroom. Oh, interesting. So a lot of is Blackboard not a thing anymore? Not that much. We got a request for it, but most teachers are on Google Docs and Canvas.

Sure. So like most K to 12, which we serve are on Google Docs in the classroom. Yeah, yeah. We have Tottle as well, but it's mainly those few. Makes sense. Yeah, but for universities, like Canvas is great. Like it'll go and highlight actual sections. So can you add that on as like one of those like, if I'm in Google Docs, I can do an

ad on. It's a Chrome extension. It's a Chrome extension. Yeah. So we realized that teachers, they don't want to 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 then we open up a window inside Google Docs. Yeah. So walk me through the typical like workflow homework, I assume it's like the student uses check. The teacher uses chat to write the questions.

Yeah. The student uses chat GMT to write the answers. And then the teacher goes back and uses check. And then you guys grade it. You guys grade it. Yeah. But what's the actual workflow? No humor in the loop at all.

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, okay. You dropped out of high school. Get the bottle of wine. Congratulations. Yeah, high school drop out. So the word.

Chad. Yeah. You front ran everybody. Everybody that was like coming into Demodeo day. Oh, yeah. I dropped out of college. It's like, that's so played out. had to one up there 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 that you see I mean I mean I mean they don't really like me that much no yeah like on my final exam well I mean I skipped finals yeah to go fly to we went to this ad tech conference in Orlando so I guess they don't really like me because of that but we we had to bring it to more teachers well they'll like you when you're the commencement speaker in a couple years maybe yeah hopefully so the workflow is where teachers usually they students submit on Google Classroom or like Canvas. Yep. They submit a Google Doc or a PDF and then the teacher opens it up, the doc, and they grade it within by like highlighting certain sections, adding comments, a summary of the feedback.

So we do the whole process. Okay. Yeah. Right into Google Doc. And then we have the teacher review everything. They can speak to our system to understand their tone and their style. Yep. So then we add those comments.

How is the actual like testing and grading and homework process changing? Because I imagine that the like the solution to chat G. 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 AIing it and then it can be AI graded and then that's a win for everyone. Is that roughly what's happening? Yeah, like the thing that we've seen is like people say all the time, you know, like students are writing with chat GPT, teachers are going to grade with AI. Like what's the whole point? But well, the objective of the student is to learn. And if you're just using like chat GPT and mindlessly submitting something, well then you're not doing the right thing. Yeah. There's There's always going to be a way to get around it. If you really don't want to learn. But for teachers, the main, like, 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 hobby-paced feedback.

Yeah. So we just want to give students the best feedback possible. Okay. Give 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 fun. 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 know, 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 like the assistant give you feedback in real time. Oh, yeah, that makes sense.

On the dock. 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 that's when they install another extension like Grammarly. Yep. 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 like memes and things like that. And teachers really, they share it.

And then they look at her 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 like UGC style content. We're actually going to the biggest ed tech conference in the U.S. Let's go. At the end of this month. The Super Bowl of Ed Tech.

Yeah. There's going to be 20,000 teachers there. And we got a really big, we bought a 400 square foot booth there. Wow. And we're going all out for it. trying to reach as make teachers as possible. Congratulations. How do you guys make your first money on the internet?

How did we first make... Like back in the day? I used to make websites for like random people. I charged like this pastor in New Jersey like $3,000 to make his church a website. Wow, there we go. That was back when I was maybe 16. I made like a mental health chat app in like grade 10. Nice.

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. Congratulations. You're going to start seeing you. Yeah. Appreciate it.

Really rude and pretty guys. I'm excited. Call us when you meet the first. Yeah, we're good. We got middle school dropout. That's why I was going with that. Welcome to the stream. We are live from YC Demoday 2025.

Good to meet you. I'm John. Nice to meet you. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? We're going to have you sit down here. We're going to 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. insurance claims operations. Okay. How's that going? Are you, is business ripping? Yeah, we're 200 KAR now. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go where the money is. That's why people ride banks, because that's where the money is. That's right, John. Go to the insurance industry. It's expensive. Who are you selling to? Are there, is, 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. It's like 42,000 across Europe and America. When did you realize that you guys loved insurance? I was like six years old. I wanted to process claims. No, I'd seen it in my job before. Like, sort of had some exposure.

My roommate as an insurance adjuster. So it was like, look over his shoulder. You're like, I'm going to put you out a job. So we can hang out and go to more movies on the weekends. I like you're working late. I want to play video games in the end. That's the best. That's awesome.

So, yeah, walk me through what your, actually building what the product experience is like, how it plugs in. I assume this is some sort of like co-pilot experience right now, or is it fully agentic? It's a full, 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. There you go. Did you get him as a customer yet? No, not yet. He works a very big carrier, so that's going to be a longer set. Playing the long game with that one. 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? Close it yesterday. Close it yesterday. Congratulations. Well, thank you so much for helping on. Good luck.

Thanks, thanks. Good luck with everything. We are, we're moving into lightning rounds. I'm going to give you one of these. Let's get it. Let's bring you in the next team. We're moving through these quicker. Thank you so much for hopping on. We are live from YC Demoday, 2025.

Welcome to the stream. Gentlemen. Come on, sit down. What are we got? Text AI. That's a good domain. Are we supposed to suit up for this? No, no, you can do whatever you want.

We don't have the right gear. Pleasure. Pleasure. Pleasure. Nice to be a good. Nice to be a good. How you doing? Sorry, we don't have an addiction chair.

I brief, I caught like 30 seconds of your two-minute pitch. 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 I messaged, they really don't like when other companies plug in.

100%. We're carrier base. Okay. As long as you have a number that you can just add to a group chat instantly. It's right then and there. Are you a beneficiary of the RCS update? Yes, we are. We are.

How? Yeah, we're working through a couple of providers that give us a number, so 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 my Twilio exists. But you know, is it good now? It feels like it was terrible for a long time. I feel like the big question around adding an AI

to your group chat is security. Security. Some things that happen. Yeah, single group chats. You want to be very careful about who you have. We've seen this the news. How are you handling security? Yeah, no.

Great question. guys. It's we don't sell your data. You can kick out the AI whenever you don't want it, right? You bring it in, bring it out. Nothing compared to like that AI 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, what's the most obvious use case like the family group chat creating a grocery list or something? Like give me some examples of how people are using this. It's actually a lot of friends using this to get a restaurant recommendations, roasting each other. Okay. When do we need to actually all meet up? Have reminders in

there, that's our first agented blow. Yeah, because 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 him the screenshot, someone's always taking the lead. Simplify it. It's like 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's always. And it was like the one poor girl and then like, this person's no taker and Fireflies and Lou and this one, this one, this one. Yeah. How are you thinking about building the agent? your sense yourself. It's definitely like a new flow. Letting people build on top of text AI. I think two things. Number one is 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 data. People interacting with us. You want to be very careful 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 we can actually grab coffee later this evening. And it can actually find it done and dust it right then and there. How much is 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 go 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 can put it on live stream right now. But we actually have collaborative AI where we can actually start doing images. That's very cool.

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 makes sense that would happen in I-Messaging. 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. It's like somebody should just be sending

Ghibli's of all the other guys in the chat. Isn't it exhausting that everyone like cuts and paste? 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. And the beauty is you can create an image, he can edit it and someone else can edit it on top of it.

Yeah, so it's much more collaborative. There is no need to really copy-paste images. You guys want to have a fun use case that we saw just developed. This is the best part of being consumer, right? Is that you're going to put this out there and you're going to see what people do it. Hinge dates. Someone 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. Okay. So you can imagine, like, this is well above beyond use cases you can have imagined. Yeah, 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 for our...

Yeah, I was leading an engineering team at Walmart. And then before that, I used to... Let's give it up for big retail. I wonder what Walmart is, huh? But before that, I was at Eventbrite and Open Table doing a lot of consumer personalization. This is some of the same workflows. So that's why I think one of the main reasons we found at TextiI was our rich sort of consumer background. Yeah.

That's very cool. Yeah, no, 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. I've known these guys for eight years. Yeah, yeah, nice.

So Rishi's first job was at a crypto startup. My wife was at. No way. hired him and then he wouldn't leave, he wouldn't leave our house. He just, like, showed up. And so I've seen him do everything. And then Perhar, of course, these guys went to school together. And so the opportunity after going in and doing a lot of executive jobs at, like, publicly

traded companies and whatnot, I think if you want to know what's happening, you've got to get hands on keyboard. Yep. 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. Congrats. Thank you very much. How's the watch game in your guys' batch? I see you guys each the Texas time. He has a better gats. He's leading the way. I might be the oldest founder everywhere to go through at YC and so yeah. What are you like 32? Oh. Lucky yes, lucky yes. Lucky yes. Yeah. Yeah. Go show to 50 than I am to 30. Okay. Okay. Cool. Pleasure. Pleasure.

Thank you. We'll see you soon. Thank you. Bye. Glad. Up next. We have another team coming in. the studio. Welcome. Cheers. Good to see you. Great nice.

Come on. Welcome to YC Demode Day. I see these two sweatshirts. Hold up. What is that? Why? Preliminary. Just preliminary.

You just assume that they're blowing out their metrics. How are you doing? Good to meet you. What's up to me you. Can you kick us off with an introduction on you in the company. You're building today. Hey guys. We're building value met.

We're automating real estate appraisals. Okay. With AI. When 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 discover this pinpoint. We both study AI at CMU. Families had a background in it and, you know, seen 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, you know, to become a lot more efficient. And that's kind of how we got into the space. What is the, what is the structure of the legacy market today? There's, you guys are, you guys are, providing a tool for people that do appraising. Yeah, exactly. So, like, the current competition is literally existed for 40 years, right? And it's just like, like, appraisal reports is like a snapshot of, like, a property. Human goes in and looks at things, takes some pictures and writes down, like, quality of the trim and floorboards and mold. So we bring this entire thing down to just a scan.

Okay. Right. So you scan it, we put a 3D model, 2D floor plan, a computer vision takes notes. Sure. And then we pull data from all these various sources. Got it. Right? And then, you know, we use AI and obviously fill out this kind of report.

So it's a, you know, it's a pretty time-consuming process that we're able to bring down. Is it a partnership with Zillow to do a better Zestimate or truly augmentation co-pilot for the existing 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 like super inaccurate. Like the estimate is like, you know, like people are like, oh, like what's just a lot? based on like 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. Right? They don't know. They don't have the data. And what we're able to do is have this digital twin, like go to the upper property.

So it's actually along the way as we're, you know, we're building this and selling, you know, software appraisants and sort. We also have the most valuable property data set than anybody's going to kind of have to vote future models. It's super accurate. Give us the metrics. What were you guys doing before this? Sure. before this we were students at Carnegie

Gamelin University we dropped out I'm sorry there's a couple guys dropped out of high school it's not really special anymore but you don't know yeah yeah yeah you did not reform here talk to us about traction

how are things going this has been going super well we started selling 20 days ago and we're at $124,000 in $104,000 in January of that congratulations you were correct to bust the

Yeah, yeah. Do you guys get the round down already? We are still filling out a round. Okay. Late stage talks with some leads. Good luck. But it's looking like we're going to. Congratulations.

Last question, when did you first discover YC? Oh, yeah. That's good question. First discover YC. So my freshman year roommate from Carnegie Mellon was actually YCF 24. Oh, there you go. Told you about it. In my mind since then I was like, okay, I have to do this.

You got to do. And then, you know, we did it. Oh, welcome. You're in the league. You're in the league. You're in the league. Welcome to the league. Welcome to Silicon Valley.

And welcome to demo day. Thank you for stopping by. We'll talk to you guys. Good to be. Let's bring you in the next crew. Thank you so much. We got a line out the door. We're going to bang through these.

These guys got QR codes on their sleeves. Bloom? Are you building bloom filters? No, no. No. So the easiest way to do. Blumen onions. Nope.

No. So lovable but for native mobile apps. Okay, cool. Oh, interesting. We'd love to just like, Please, please, please. Okay, 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, I wrote Objective C. It was terrible. I wrote X code. It's awesome.

We 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 it for apps to review. You have to get your users to download it and test light, enter an invite code. Okay. So with us, I can literally just like talking to my phone, build a native app, and then I can send it to you via literally bumping phones. Do you have an iPhone?

Yeah, I do, I do. Wow. You just load the app right under the home screen. Okay. Malware installed. All personal information extracted. Here we go. I don't know.

I got one. Let me see. We got half. I mean, this is just using airdrop. Do you need to turn it on again? No. Oh, no. Live demo.

Live demos. Yeah, AirDrop, like maybe we need another iPhone. Are you on the same Wi-Fi? You want to try? Yeah, I'll try it. Yeah, I'll try it. Yeah, I'll try it. Yeah, that's probably the issue.

Okay, I got it. Okay, cool. Let's try it now. There we go. All right. Skill issue, maybe, okay. Is it going? This is all Apple.

You saw the wave, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I only have ramp, public, ad quick, eight, sling, wandered, and puzzle installed right now. Those are only apps on that. Let's give it one more shot. Okay.

Otherwise, we'll have to try on your phone. Yeah, it's okay. It's not like this is live or anything. Okay, you try, you try. Anyways, keep, keep. Yeah, so, so when someone like tries to build an app with Bloom, right? It's doing the way, but it's not doing that? I think the internet just sucks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's play 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 on the hood. Oh yeah, oh, okay. So that's how you're getting the app on without me actually installing the whole app. Exactly. Exactly.

And then... Oh, you're really hacking the app. Exactly. That's awesome. Okay, okay, yeah, yeah. And so the other thing is, like, when you prompt to build an app with us, we also automatically deploy a backend for you. Yeah.

Yeah. Real-time syncs, the way between devices. As I understand an app clips, it's like, it's like, there's like one app clip, 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 around one IOS. Oh, wow. It's one bloom app clip that then loads apps.

whatever. Yeah. So it's like an app store within an app store. Yeah. Kind of thing. Yeah. We talked on the show before about this idea of like ephemeral apps.

Yeah. Like memes. Exactly. Like there's a lot of things that should exist but only for like a day. 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. There's so many people like people have an idea for an app and you're like, well you realize it'll cost like a million dollars. Exactly.

Exactly. Like with us, we built an app for, for demo. in five minutes that everyone in the audience could just scan to like vote on our valuation in five years and it like had a graph that updated in real time for everyone because it has a backend connected to it and so what we want to enable is a creator economy but for software okay under the hood what are the best cogeneration LLMs that you're using what do you like what's exciting and how how is that market developing yeah so I mean right now we're we're obviously for the smartest models we're using cloud for sonnet but we're also experimenting with you know a smart mode smart mode smart mode in a fast mode because sometimes people just want to make like a quick edit to their app and like literally you can just speak into our phones right you just go into like this like edit mode and then you can just type hey add this feature or whatever very cool and so sometimes you just want those changes fast okay and what's cool is like if you had this app open it would also hot reload on your device yeah yeah so 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 a software as a creative outlet use this so developers designers and entrepreneurs sure so especially for designers and non-technical entrepreneurs it's great because they can just like be 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 like a wildlife tracking app for their conservation and then people building like funny apps for weddings the most delicious animals to go after to conserve the animals for my for my own hunting for my next hunting expedition. But yeah, what I'm really excited about is like the apps that I can't even imagine, right? It's kind of like when the YouTube founders put out YouTube, I'm sure they weren't imagining vlogging. They didn't imagine images and chatypc.

They didn't really imagine studio dollars. Exactly. 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, brown is closed. Oh, there's we go.

Let's go. All right. Pleasure. Nice to see you. Good stuff. Bring in the next team. Welcome to the demo day stream. I'm breathing in the micropsychic.

Oh, yeah. This is violating everything I know about you. Put your life on the line. How's it going? Hey, what's happening? Hi. How are you guys? Pleasure.

Hi. Hi. Hi. I don't have long. 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 her when I was 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.

Sure. What is exciting in terms of robotics in manufacturing? There's a lot of noise about humanoid, but we talk to a lot of people who are doing. Is it just saying? Robotics in manufacturing or is it a tool to accelerate the manufacturing of robots? That second one. Yes, the second one. But the main app, Beachhead market is really an industrial robots.

Okay. Yeah. So we were both right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the crazy stat 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. So 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 concentrated is the robotic arm market? Are there 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 an adrenalineer engineer trying to make a new hand for four to six weeks and a new design. So really plugging in in 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 controlled design side of things. 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 work with. And aside from that, it's task specifications, but we, unlike a lot of the Gen A.I. companies out there, we do employ some Gen A.I. 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 curates 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. Fantastic.

Non-delutive? Fully non-deloluted. Congratulations. We love it for that, Jordy. Oh my God. It's going to happen. Hey, non-deluge. That's less than what I didn't hear than out there.

I mean, Europe just shooting themselves in the foot. Not getting to the captain. They're going to be like, why didn't we get equity? At least like quarter point or something. Anyway, congratulations. Thank you. None of us are British, but they basically have a switch. Well, we're setting up an office in London.

Like, we're really excited about working with them and sending up an office. Of course, there's benefits to the research community. Absolutely. We have a lot of collaborators there as well. Yeah, it's fantastic. That's good. It'll be an amazing outcome for that. Last thing.

Bull bear on humanoids. Yes, humanoids. What's your take? I'm bare, but, like, medium bear. I don't know. It was like, okay, if you're, You're going to 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, ballerina, exactly. Linebacker looks different than a... 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 humanoid 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 a, yeah, you're not saying embarrassing a hundred year timeline. Or even maybe a 10 year time. Yeah, I just think it's a little. I completely agree. Very reasonable stance.

Awesome. Anyway, congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to give you a slow of progress. So we don't have to deal with the whole. Or we could do like a share a fist like it. Oh, okay, perfect.

Anyway, let's bring in the next team. We're putting the word out. Thank you so much. The table is now covered with confetti. The UK is giving out millions of dollars for free. Head over across the pond. This could be the greatest capital extraction event. The greatest wealth.

of that in history. In history. Since the Boston Tea Party. Anyway, good to meet you. Welcome to the stream. My name's John. How are you doing? Can you introduce yourself in the company?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So I'm Rudgett. We're Prism. Okay. Prism is an agentic observability company. Okay. So we let developers configure agents to watch their production systems.

Okay. So read logs for them, watch videos of their customers using software, and then enable them to take certain action. So like create issues on Linear, GitHub. Yeah, there we go. Sponsor the Stream. Let's hear to live. Yeah, I did that on purpose.

And send reports to Slack. That's great. That's great. 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. We're completely self-serve. So there's 23 people on the platform and counting. More people sign up and start using it every time. Were you guys iterating through the batch process? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we were. So the first version of the product, so it's,

like we watch videos of people using software, right? Sure. So the first version of the product was these two watching everyone's videos and just giving them issues and like sending them Slack messages and stuff like guys, this is broken, you need to fix this. Yeah, yeah. 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. Gotta start somewhere. That's awesome. Yeah, true. What, how's fundraising going? You guys in the midst of it? It's going great. We're in the midst of it.

Still, you know, still trying to finish up the round. Yeah. Good luck. But yeah, we're excited, excited. That's fantastic. Awesome. What were you doing before? I was at Greptile, which a code review company. Oh, yeah.

I think you guys, yeah. Crazy website. We love their website. We love their website. That's amazing. It's a great website. You two? I was a software engineer at Poundtoo.

Oh, cool. And I worked in product at Johnson Johnson. Oh, very cool. Alex. It's good for Big Pharma. Yeah, yeah. So Land and I met in high school, and then all three of us were I joined a tech together.

Oh, cool. But Alex actually had a post on LinkedIn this morning about how he left $850K a year behind that Palantir to come work with us. There we go. I think you'll make it all back. Just burn the boats. Just burn the boats.

Anyway, good luck with the rest of Demer Day. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. We are ready for the next guest on the YC Demo Day Street. Tyler's crushing. 10 minutes left.

10 minutes left and then we've got to go. Yeah, we can speed through this as much as we can. We got 10 minutes until we got to go to the airport. Is that right? Or start passing? To wrap. We got 10 minutes. We got 10 minutes more.

Come on in. Don't even bother any. Introducing yourself, just tell us what you do. What company are you building? How are you doing? We are Clarm. We are perplexity on internal documents. So search is being heavily disrupted 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 Glean. They just raised a bunch of money. How are you thinking about it? We're going to replace them. You're going to replace them. They're just getting started. You're replacing Google. We're replacing Glean.

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 in integration with Google Docs, for example, or integration with like the data lake that maybe somebody has a snowflake installation? What's more important? Yeah, for you.

It's important to have both of them so that you can connect. 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 the biggest challenge is permissioning hard? Maybe at smaller companies, it's not as much of an issue, but as you go kind of 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 Messia Excel sheets, then it becomes harder to harder to connect them together.

But that's the value in it. Where can companies go to get started? They can go to clarm.com. They can try our live demo now. You own the five-letter domain already. Congratulations. Congratulations on Demode. They can talk just directly.

And fantastic JLC Reverse. Thank you very much. It's a fantastic watch. We'll see you. Congratulations. Let's bring in the next team. We're doing lightning round, lightning round, lightning round at YC Demo Day 2025.

Welcome to the street. What do you do? What are you building? pilot for solopreneurs. That's it. 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 YCDW? Who's more cracked? He's definitely the most cracked engineer we have ever seen. He's the most correct in the truth. So we've gone from zero to 300k era. What?

Let's go. Congratulations. Yes. So that's what we're doing. Absolutely dogs. And yeah, we're seeing the future where solo planners are going to completely wipe coat and run their entire business. on cactus. So that's what we're building.

Great name. Great name. Thank you. What were you guys doing before this? We built a previous YC company. He was a founding engineer. We scaled it up to 2.5 million. Yeah. That's it. That's it. That's the exact guy. He's a crack sales guy. I'm the cracked engineer and together we are the crack founders. So crack sales guy, how are you actually selling this thing as a 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 a 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 method saying, hey, you just missed an opportunity, guys. So yeah, they get back and then they set up cactors. 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. Yep. That's the best thing. That's amazing. Yeah. 300KR. A.R. How's the fundraise going? It's going. It's going. It's going. great. We just got completely oversubscribed. Oh, exactly. Well, congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 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. Welcome. Good to meet you guys. Hi. Would you mind introducing your company? What are you building? Yeah, for sure. So we are building Lamari, which is essentially helping go-to-market teams build tools internally. instead of having to buy super expensive SaaS.

What tools do you go to market teams need? Like golf clubs? Yeah, yeah, yeah, golf club buying machine on subscription and state dinner booking. That would be nice. That would be nice. I wish we did that. But we are helping them like from anything from deals scoring,

qualifying leads, making contracts, like anything down like the sales pipeline. Got it, got it, okay. Yeah, what is the future of the stack look like? Are you guys going to basically, are you trying to verticalize effectively and allow people to build custom software at every point. Every point, yeah, I really think we're going to look back to this era of SaaS

of having all this 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 going to have their own CRR. What were you doing before this? What were we? 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? This is for a non-technical person?

It's a non-technical person within these go-to-market teams. Often, like, a revenue operation, sales operations kind of role. That makes a ton of sense. Awesome. How's traction? It's been great. We're at 90K ARR in Street Wills. Congratulations.

Obviously, we're out of the confetti. Yes, yeah, we are. We're pretty much out. We got a couple of luck. Okay, okay. I'll let you say this. They're kind of busted. Yay.

Anyway, thanks so much for coming on the stream. Thank you. Let's bring you in the next team. We have five more minutes, right? Something like that. Let's go. Five more minutes. Let's go.

I'm losing my voice. Welcome. Welcome to the stream. Introduce yourself. How are you? Good to me. What are you? Chairs all over your shirt.

I'm Yoav. And this is Shuria. Okay. We're second time exited YC founders. Start up. Thank you. Addicted to startups. Addicted to startups.

We're building third chair. Okay. It's agents for Inhouse. 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... Do you want to dominate a small market? No, it's a massive market.

Oh, it is. But we're starting by dominating media and entertainment. Sure, 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 the 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. It's kind of a mix.

Yeah, yeah. We're exploring a little bit. How's traction? What have you shared? 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? Wait, is this your third demo day then?

Second Demo Day. Second Demo Day. Second Demo Day. Second Demo Day. You guys co-founders last time? What's that? Are you co-founders together last time? No, we had separate startups.

Rivals, joining forces. Social media and Linux. Now we're in legal. So YC. Alumni Network is strong. You know, we teams up. And yeah, traction's going great. Cool.

We just crossed 100,000 AR. 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 to all progress. Thank you guys so much.

We will talk to you soon. Let's bring in the next team. How are you doing? Q. Ooh, I like this. QFX. NetSum capital. Here, T.C.

Introduce yourself. How are you doing? I think Solof founder. We got to give them a hat, a TBPN hat. Oh, yeah, definitely. How you doing? Introduce yourself. That's amazing.

Here. Perfect. Let's swap. Yeah. So, hi, guys. I'm an NANM CEO of QFX. Cool. We're making a 24-7, 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 have to prefer. Rodes of leverage. Exactly. Who's the leverage, right? How's the traction bit?

It feels like it's really hard to get these things off. 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 the traditional assets world. Okay. 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. Sure. But we've been running some internal experiments. Yeah, some internal experiments to the current YC batch. And due to those experiments, we're launching in a couple of months.

Congratulations. With the license. And you're launching offshore? Offshore. Offshore. Offshore. in Bermuda. We'll get your back.

Bermuda. It's a nice place. You guys have a great place. You're going to be taking a lot of trips there. Yeah, exactly. Free rum if you come visit our office. There you go. Fantastic.

There you go. How do you get into this? I was a quant. Yeah, I was at Tower Research before. And my co-founder was at Citadel. Well, you're our Kwan now. Yeah, exactly. Well, can get those jobs.

Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon. Yeah. Great to meet you guys. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks. 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, you were here last time? Were you on? No, no, 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 do you build? Yeah, I'm building an AI accounting for small businesses. Oh, okay, 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. 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. We're just replacing the service side of things. So consolidating all the scattered data that sits in all different kinds of places, your WhatsApp, your email, your Stripe, everything. How were you doing before this? 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 $2 million and roughly like three quarters finished. Fantastic. Fantastic. There we go. Classic, two on 20. That's really funny. Love it. Congratulations. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Last one. Bringing it in, closing it out strong with. What's going on?

Is it Sim Studio? Are you simulating things? Yes, we are. I'm simulating. How are you? How are you? How are you? How are you doing?

Great. I'm doing great. Break it down for us. What are you building? It's an open source platform to build AI agents. Yeah. So it's developer focus. It's like a figma-like canvas to build agents.

Interesting. How many get HubStars you got? We got to ask. 50 to 4,000 in the last two months. What? Wait, wait, you're 50 and now you have 4,000. Yes. Wow.

Congratulations. Thank you. I appreciate that. Thanks. Yeah. Oh,000 GitHub stars. You love to see it. Yeah. Congratulations. We got two more.

I can't believe Gary. Let us bring these in. Oh, yeah. You let us. Yeah. The cleanup after is going to be interesting. Anyway, how's traction been in on the sales side? I imagine you have a product that you actually sell on top of it, not a nonprofit.

Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, we can't disclose revenue numbers, but we have a lot of great customers. Cool. So, yeah, Department of Defense. Yeah. Mercore, Epic Global. Oh, wow.

Huge, huge, huge. So the round's definitely done. Definitely done. Yeah. Let's do another one. The round's done? Oh. What were you doing before this?

So I was at Berkeley and my co-foundland out. At Berkeley? Oh, let's go. Let's hear from Berkeley, baby. Right across the bay. Go bears. Right across the bay. We love it.

We love Berkeley. Yeah. I'm completely covered. It's everywhere. Congratulations. I appreciate it. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, that's great.

What's next for you guys? Next is just making our customers happy. What do you get after 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. You know, and I think developers love us and big customers love us. So we're just like 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 platform for AI agents. Is it like interoperability between different models? Is it the ability to scale? Is it just price and cost and speed? The question I have is like even last YC Batch there was companies with this pitch.

And I think the challenge is everybody wants to build infrastructure and take some travels 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 like 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 invogue to adopt AI. And so there's a lot of push, like 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,

into your production system. And so for us, we're really focused on actually, it might be a little more, like might be 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, we're 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. Okay. I think. What are the applications? Yeah. So the applications of that are essentially simulating like I guess like one that would be interesting would be like international affairs.

So like understanding how like global events are going to play out. political conflict. We're using agents. No way. Yeah, so that's like, you know, a broad topic that we're kind of interesting to exploring. Yeah, I've heard about that with like economic modeling. Exactly. And like housing prices.

You can actually have agents running. And he was always like just like grand theft auto level. Right, right, right. But now it's like, oh, what if each of them has like an internal reasoning engine powered by an LLM? And that'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, like thesis, was that, you know, we wanted to create this environment. Like, Sim Studio comes from building simulations of things. So launching, you know, 10,000 agents out of time. And perhaps some of them are going to come back and give you an accurate result or some of them, you know, might inform you in an interesting way. And so you take those aggregated results and you go do something with it.

Very cool. Yeah. Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Yeah, yeah. Thank you to you both. 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 TVP and Ultram. Thank you to Gary and the whole YC team for having us. Thank you to Y Combinator team. It is fantastic. Major White Hill. San Francisco's back. Gary Tans 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. I have a great afternoon. Thank you for watching. We will see you tomorrow.

Goodbye.