How did they get YC funding? It doesn’t seem like they have even a POC or any technical employees.

Have you seen the companies YC has been funding recently? All you need to do is mention AI and YC will throw some money your way. I don't know if you saw my first attempt at a post, but someone should suggest AI for HN comment formatting and I'm sure it will be funded.

Acrely — AI for HVAC administration

Aden — AI for ERP operations

AgentHub — AI for agent simulation and evaluation

Agentin AI — AI for enterprise agents

AgentMail — AI for agent email infrastructure

AlphaWatch AI — AI for financial search

Alter — AI for secure agent workflow access control

Altur — AI for debt collection voice agents

Ambral — AI for account management

Anytrace — AI for support engineering

April — AI for voice executive assistants

AutoComputer — AI for robotic desktop automation

Autosana — AI for mobile QA

Autotab — AI for knowledge work

Avent — AI for industrial commerce

b-12 — AI for chemical intelligence

Bluebirds — AI for outbound targeting

burnt — AI for food supply chain operations

Cactus — AI for smartphone model deployment

Candytrail — AI for sales funnel automation

CareSwift — AI for ambulance operations

Certus AI — AI for restaurant phone lines

Clarm — AI for search and agent building

Clodo — AI for real estate CRMs

Closera — AI for commercial real estate employees

Clueso — AI for instructional content generation

cocreate — AI for video editing

Comena — AI for order automation in distribution

ContextFort — AI for construction drawing reviews

Convexia — AI for pharma drug discovery

Credal.ai — AI for enterprise workflow assistants

CTGT — AI for preventing hallucinations

Cyberdesk — AI for legacy desktop automation

datafruit — AI for DevOps engineering

Daymi — AI for personal clones

DeepAware AI — AI for data center efficiency

Defog.ai — AI for natural-language data queries

Design Arena — AI for design benchmarks

Doe — AI for autonomous private equity workforce

Double – Coding Copilot — AI for coding assistance

EffiGov — AI for local government call centers

Eloquent AI — AI for complex financial workflows

F4 — AI for compliance in engineering drawings

Finto — AI for enterprise accounting

Flai — AI for dealership customer acquisition

Floot — AI for app building

Fluidize — AI for scientific experiments

Flywheel AI — AI for excavator autonomy

Freya — AI for financial services voice agents

Frizzle — AI for teacher grading

Galini — AI guardrails as a service

Gaus — AI for retail investors

Ghostship — AI for UX bug detection

Golpo — AI for video generation from documents

Halluminate — AI for training computer use

HealthKey — AI for clinical trial matching

Hera — AI for motion design

Humoniq — AI for BPO in travel and transport

Hyprnote — AI for enterprise notetaking

Imprezia — AI for ad networks

Induction Labs — AI for computer use automation

iollo — AI for multimodal biological data

Iron Grid — AI for hardware insurance

IronLedger.ai — AI for property accounting

Janet AI — AI for project management (AI-native Jira)

Kernel — AI for web agent browsing infrastructure

Kestroll — AI for media asset management

Keystone — AI for software engineering

Knowlify — AI for explainer video creation

Kyber — AI for regulatory notice drafting

Lanesurf — AI for freight booking voice automation

Lantern — AI for Postgres application development

Lark — AI for billing operations

Latent — AI for medical language models

Lemma — AI for consumer brand insights

Linkana — AI for supplier onboarding reviews

Liva AI — AI for video and voice data labeling

Locata — AI for healthcare referral management

Lopus AI — AI for deal intelligence

Lotas — AI for data science IDEs

Louiza Labs — AI for synthetic biology data

Luminai — AI for business process automation

Magnetic — AI for tax preparation

MangoDesk — AI for evaluation data

Maven Bio — AI for BioPharma insights

Meteor — AI for web browsing (AI-native browser)

Mimos — AI for regulated firm visibility in search

Minimal AI — AI for e-commerce customer support

Mobile Operator — AI for mobile QA

Mohi — AI for workflow clarity

Monarcha — AI for GIS platforms

moonrepo — AI for developer workflow tooling

Motives — AI for consumer research

Nautilus — AI for car wash optimization

NOSO LABS — AI for field technician support

Nottelabs — AI for enterprise web agents

Novaflow — AI for biology lab analytics

Nozomio — AI for contextual coding agents

Oki — AI for company intelligence

Okibi — AI for agent building

Omnara — AI for agent command centers

OnDeck AI — AI for video analysis

Onyx — AI for generative platform development

Opennote — AI for note-based tutoring

Opslane — AI for ETL data pipelines

Orange Slice — AI for sales lead generation

Outlit — AI for quoting and proposals

Outrove — AI for Salesforce

Pally — AI for relationship management

Paloma — AI for billing CRMs

Parachute — AI for clinical evaluation and deployment

PARES AI — AI for commercial real estate brokers

People.ai — AI for enterprise growth insights

Perspectives Health — AI for clinic EMRs

Pharmie AI — AI for pharmacy technicians

Phases — AI for clinical trial automation

Pingo AI — AI for language learning companions

Pleom — AI for conversational interaction

Qualify.bot — AI for commercial lending phone agents

Reacher — AI for creator collaboration marketing

Ridecell — AI for fleet operations

Risely AI — AI for campus administration

Risotto — AI for IT helpdesk automation

Riverbank Security — AI for offensive security

Saphira AI — AI for certification automation

Sendbird — AI for omnichannel agents

Sentinel — AI for on-call engineering

Serafis — AI for institutional investor knowledge graphs

Sigmantic AI — AI for HDL design

Sira — AI for HR management of hourly teams

Socratix AI — AI for fraud and risk teams

Solva — AI for insurance

Spotlight Realty — AI for real estate brokerage

StackAI — AI for low-code agent platforms

stagewise — AI for frontend coding agents

Stellon Labs — AI for edge device models

Stockline — AI for food wholesaler ERP

Stormy AI — AI for influencer marketing

Synthetic Society — AI for simulating real users

SynthioLabs — AI for medical expertise in pharma

Tailor — AI for retail ERP automation

Tecto AI — AI for governance of AI employees

Tesora — AI for procurement analysis

Trace — AI for workflow automation

TraceRoot.AI — AI for automated bug fixing

truthsystems — AI for regulated governance layers

Uplift AI — AI for underserved voice languages

Veles — AI for dynamic sales pricing

Veritus Agent — AI for loan servicing and collections

Verne Robotics — AI for robotic arms

VoiceOS — AI for voice interviews

VoxOps AI — AI for regulated industry calls

Vulcan Technologies — AI for regulatory drafting

Waydev — AI for engineering leadership insights

Wayline — AI for property management voice automation

Wedge — AI for healthcare trust layers

Workflow86 — AI for workflow automation

ZeroEval — AI for agent evaluation and optimization

▲

jamiek88 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Oh my god, this hilariously looks like it could have been LLM generated itself!

▲

JustExAWS 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

And the ideas may or may not be bad. I don’t know enough about any of the business segments. But to paraphrase the famous Steve Jobs quote “those aren’t businesses, they are features” [1] that a company that is already in the business should be able to throw a few halfway decent engineers at and add the feature to an existing product with real users.

[1] He said that about Dropbox. He wasn’t wrong just premature. For the price of 2TB on Dropbox, you can get the entire GSuite with 2TB or Office365 with 1TB for up to five users for 5TB in all.

▲

fragmede 3 days ago | parent [-]

now you can, but, what, are you gonna lie down and wait for tech giants to do everything? Not every company needs to be Apple. If Dropbox filed for bankruptcy tomorrow, they've still made millionaires of thousands of people and given jobs to hundreds more, and enabled people to share their files online.

Steve Jobs gets to call other companies small because Apple is huge, but there are thousands of companies that "are just features". Yeah, features they forgot to add!

Apple still doesn't make cases for their phones.

▲

JustExAWS 3 days ago | parent [-]

Out of the literally thousands of companies that YC has invested in, only about a dozen have gone public, the rest are either dead, zombies or got acquired. These are all acquisition plays.

Even the ones that have gone public haven’t done that well in aggregate.

https://medium.com/@kazeemibrahim18/the-post-ipo-performance...

Dropbox was solving a hard infrastructure problem at scale. These companies are just making some API calls to a model.

If an established company in any of these verticals - not necessarily BigTech - see an opportunity, they are either going to throw a few engineers at the problem and add it as a feature or hire a company like the one I work for and we are going to knock out an implementation in a few months.

The one YC company I mentioned above is expecting to have their product written by one “full stack engineer” that they are only willing to pay $150K for. How difficult can it be?

▲

fragmede 3 days ago | parent [-]

> These are all acquisition plays.

Which seems fine? VC money gets thrown at a problem, the problem may or may not get solved by a particular team, but a company gets created, some people do some work, some people make money, others don't. I don't get it. Are you saying no one should bother doing anything because someone else is already doing it or that it's not difficult so why try?

	▲	JustExAWS 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I’m pushing back against this… > Not every company needs to be Apple These aren’t people deciding to build “companies” - ie create a product that people want and turn a profit. They are a legal Ponzi scheme.

▲

4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

▲

JustExAWS 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have a confession to make, I was about to downvote you because I thought you just asked ChatGPT to come up with some ridiculous company concepts and copy and pasted.

Then I saw the sibling comment and searched a couple of company names and realized they were real.

	▲	ewoodrich 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I made it as far as "Halluminate" and thought I got got until I Googled it.

▲

kehvyn 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wow, that's a lot of AI.

Do you think they're all using actual LLMs? I've got a natural language parser I could probably market as "AI Semantic Detection" even though it's all regular expressions

▲

v-yanakiev 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

From what I’ve read, this is a consequence of applicants themselves concentrating on AI, which preceded their AI-filled batches. YC still has a very low acceptance rate, btw.

▲

n2h4 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

▲

4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]