The AI Boom in Y Combinator

The most recent Y Combinator winter batch is filled with startups utilizing AI to develop innovative technologies and applications. As AI models continue to advance, we're seeing a rise in creative AI-powered solutions. In this blog post, join me on a journey as I explore and dive into the world of AI-focused startups that are part of the Y Combinator family.

What is Y Combinator (YC)?

Y Combinator (YC) is a highly influential startup accelerator based in Silicon Valley, California. Founded in 2005 by Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell, Y Combinator provides seed funding, mentorship, resources, and networking opportunities to startups during a three-month intensive program. Twice a year, YC runs a funding cycle where selected startups receive an investment in exchange for a small percentage of equity.

Startups admitted to Y Combinator's program work on their ideas and receive guidance from the YC team and other successful entrepreneurs from the YC alumni network. The program culminates in a Demo Day, where the startups present their progress and pitch to a room full of investors.

Y Combinator has played a pivotal role in the success of many high-profile companies, including Dropbox, Airbnb, Reddit, DoorDash, and Stripe. YC's mission is to help startups build great products and services, and its alumni network has become an influential community in the tech industry.

AI Startups in the Winter 2023 Batch of YC

Get ready for an exhilarating journey as we plunge into the world of cutting-edge AI startups from the Y Combinator Winter 2023 batch! Hold on tight and prepare to be amazed! 🚀

BerriAI

• Description: API for SaaS businesses to create ChatGPT apps programmatically.
• Founders: Ishaan Jaffer and Krish
• Link: https://berri.ai/

Atri Labs

• Description: Atri framework enables Python developers to create beautiful frontends using a visual builder. Since their launch 4 months ago, they have 3.9k+ GitHub stars. Companies like Meta are using them to build internal ML web apps and AI startups are using them to build their flagship web apps.
• Founders: Darshita Chaturvedi and Shyam Swaroop
• Link: https://atrilabs.com/

Type

• Description: Type is an AI-first document editor that helps marketers and creators write high-quality content quickly. Rather than writing important content from scratch, individuals and teams can use Type to instantly generate drafts, rewrite content, and suggest what to create next.
• Founders: Stew Fortier and Stefan Li
• Link: https://type.ai/

Untether Labs

• Description: Untether Labs provides Clinic’s operations team software to staff doctors, improve margins and optimize schedules to see more patients. Taking best-in-class software and bringing it to healthcare.
• Founders: Aditya Sharma and Lucas Della Bella
• Link: https://untetherlabs.com/

Vocode

• Description: Vocode makes it easy for developers to build voice-based LLM applications. Using Vocode, developers can integrate realistic voice AI in product flows or automate interactions like phone calls in 10 lines of code.
• Founders: Ajay Raj and Kian Hooshmand
• Link: https://docs.vocode.dev/welcome

Vellum

• Description: Vellum is a developer platform for building production-worthy applications on LLMs like OpenAI’s GPT-3 or Anthropic’s Claude. Use Vellum to save hours on prompt engineering, iterate on prompts in production confidently, and continuously fine-tune for better results (they helped one customer save 94% of their LLM costs through fine-tuning!).
• Founders: Sidd Seethepalli, Noa Flaherty, and Akash Sharma
• Link: https://www.vellum.ai/

Persana AI

• Description: Persana AI is an intelligent sales copilot powered by our own custom fine-tuned models. They ingest all of a company’s internal CRM data, combine it with public web sources on each of their prospects, and give them insights on who to prioritize based on crucial intent signals so that they capture ripe opportunities. For instance, when a lead visits the company website or gets funding, Persana AI can notify the sales team and generate an email to send out right away.
• Founders: Sriya Maram and Rush Shahani
• Link: https://www.persana.ai/

BabylonAI

• Description: BabylonAI is building the platform to handle the post-deployment flow of data you need to evaluate and retrain your models.
• Founders: Rangel Milushev and Ahmad Roumie
• Link: https://www.babylonai.dev/

Unstatiq

• Description: Faster data integrations using AI
• Founders: Sachin Jaishankar and Nishanth Singaraju
• Link: Stealth

Baseplate

• Description: Baseplate is a no-code platform for fine-tuning, monitoring, and managing Large Language Models. They analyze your prompts & training data, test your model, and provide deep insights to help you get the most out of LLMs without the hassle.
• Founders: Andrew Luo and Ani Gottiparthy
• Link: https://www.baseplate.ai/

Turntable

• Description: Turntable is a collaborative tool to create and manage data pipelines- built from the ground up with AI. To start, we’re focused on reducing the time and cost of transforming data within DBT, an open-source data engineering platform.
• Founders: Wally Gurzynski, Justin Leder, and Ian Tracey
• Link: https://www.turntable.so/

Quazel

• Description: Quazel is a conversational language learning tool that helps people learn a language simply by talking. In unscripted and dynamic conversation users can say whatever they like into the microphone and the AI responds and carries on the conversation.
• Founders: Samuel Bissegger, Philipp Hadjimina and David Niederberger
• Link: https://www.quazel.com/

MagnaPlay

• Description: AI-assisted translators to largely automate the process of translating your game. They turn months of work into days, profit-ruining expenses into manageable costs, and they help connect the world through gaming.
• Founders: Pedro Esteves and Paulo Rodrigues
• Link: https://magnaplay.com/

Baselit

• Description: Baselit enables businesses to embed ChatGPT-powered analytics for their customers. For example, with Baselit, a marketplace can enable its sellers to ask "Which of my product goes out of stock most frequently?" and get answers instantly. Give your customers their own personal data analyst!
• Founders: Ankit Goyal, Shubham Rana and Sahil Singla
• Link: https://baselit.ai/

UpTrain AI

• Description: UpTrain is an open-source ML observability and refinement tool. It helps data scientists observe how their ML models are performing in production and continuously improve them over time by automatically retraining them on cases where the model accuracy was low.
• Founders: Sourabh Agrawal, Vipul Gupta, and Shikha Mohanty
• Link: https://uptrain.ai/

Hadrius

• Description: The Hadrius next-gen platform automates the entire SEC ongoing compliance process, saving you 90%+ of the time and with better accuracy than humans.
• Founders: Allen Calderwood, Thomas Stewart, and Som Mohapatra
• Link: https://www.hadrius.com/

Gloo

• Description: LLMs are awesome, but they can’t answer questions about YOUR data. Gloo is a search engine optimized for producing domain-specific context that you can feed into LLMs.
• Founders: Vaibhav Gupta and Aaron Villalpando Gonzalez
• Link: https://www.trygloo.com/

Blocktool

• Description: Blocktool API gives you access to several LLMs and optimizes your cost by routing queries to the best and cheapest models.
• Founders: Nicolas Bustamante and Edouard Godfrey
• Link: https://www.blocktool.com/

222

• Description: 222 is a full-stack social experiences platform to generate real-life experiences at curated hyperlocal venues where they can reliably predict you will like both the people & place.
• Founders: Danial Hashemi, Keyan Kazemian, and Arman Roshannai
• Link: https://www.222.place/

Magicflow

• Description: Magicflow is a no-code drag-and-drop tool to design and run AI workflows that easily integrate into your app. Complex workflows tend to be expensive and slow. Magicflow can optimize them for cost and speed so you don’t have to deal with the painful infrastructure work.
• Founders: Yotam Hamiel and Yarden Shem Tov
• Link: https://www.magicflow.ai/

Orchid

• Description: Orchid is an Electronic Health Record (EHR) for independent mental health professionals that saves clinicians' time, money, and frustration. They do this by integrating core administrative workflows, streamlining clinical processes, and automating manual flows. Altogether, Orchid practitioners reclaim ~500+ hours of their time spent on administrative work, with the potential to save $11B in healthcare costs annually.
• Founders: Joseph Pomianowski and Daniel Varga
• Link: https://orchid.health/

Truewind

• Description: Truewind (YC W23) is AI-powered bookkeeping and financial modeling for startups. Using GPT-3, Truewind captures the business context that only founders have, making accounting easier and more accurate. Through a combination of AI and concierge service, Truewind delivers a delightful financial back-office experience
• Founders: Tennison Chan and Alex Lee
• Link: https://www.truewind.ai/

Wild Moose

• Description: Wild Moose helps on-call developers more quickly identify the source of production incidents. They do this by providing a conversational AI trained on their environment. They feed observability data into a Large-Language Model. Then, when something breaks, they can just ask the moose a question and get an answer.
• Founders: Yasmin Dunsky, Roei Schuster, and Tom Tytunovich
• Link: https://www.wildmoose.ai/

Extend

• Description: Extend enables companies to build a custom Copilot for their internal workflows. They do this by making it easy to deploy internal Chrome extensions that connect to your internal systems (database + APIs) and interface with any external website your team relies on today (Intercom, Salesforce, GSheets, etc).
• Founder: Kushal Byatnal
• Link: https://www.extend.app/

Anarchy

• Description: Anarchy provides a platform for building customized chatbots on top of existing LLMs.
• Founders: Matthew Mirman and James Spoor
• Link: https://anarchy.ai/

Intently

• Description: Find ready-to-buy prospects and engage them with personalized outreach that shows a clear understanding of their needs, way ahead of the competition.
• Founders: Mikalai Melchanka, Slava Solonitsyn, and Dmitry Starodubtsev
• Link: https://www.getintently.ai/

Chart

• Description: Chart makes it super easy for companies to self-host high-performant ML models. The model and the data stay within the companies’ cloud providers (AWS or GCP), but they offer a SaaS platform to hide all the complexities of packaging models (Dockerfiles, Flask servers, CUDA versions, etc.), provisioning right-sized GPU servers and deploying them into well-documented APIs.
• Founder: Fatih Celikbas
• Link: https://www.getcharteditor.com/

Buildt

• Description: Buildt is an AI tool to help developers quickly search, understand, and extend large codebases. Engineers have to work with multi-million line codebases; our LLM-powered tool makes this simple. Buildt understands how your entire codebase works holistically, like a human engineer, powering semantic search, clear explanations, and multi-file codegen. New engineers can onboard faster onto large codebases by asking Buildt questions; existing engineers can search code semantically and instantly perform multi-file codegen.
• Founders: Yang Li, Alistair Pullen, and Sam Stenner
• Link: https://www.buildt.ai/

Bluebirds

• Description: Bluebirds helps outbound teams resell to past customers who switched jobs. Any rep, manager, or rev ops can sign up on the website and Bluebirds will automatically identify champions using Machine Learning, detect job changes, and deliver hundreds of warm leads.
• Founders: Rohan Punamia and Kunal Punera
• Link: https://www.bluebirds.ai/

Zenfetch

• Description: Zenfetch is a real-time call assistant for technical sales teams. Our customers use us to help their non-technical sellers deal with technical objections on the spot without needing a product or sales engineer present. While technical sales teams are our best first customers, they envision a world in which all knowledge workers use real-time call assistants to supercharge their meetings. The founders, Gabe and Akash, met at Johns Hopkins where they built their first startup together. As a product manager at Meta, Akash led a team to build the first system co-presence platform for virtual reality. Gabe was most recently a machine learning engineer at Stripe where he founded the financial crimes engineering team.
• Founders: Akash Mandavilli and Gabe Villasana
• Link: https://www.zenfetch.com/

PoplarML

• Description: PoplarML lets you deploy any machine-learning model to a fleet of GPUs as a ready-to-use and scalable API endpoint with one command.
• Founders: Evan Chu and Danna Liu
• Link: https://poplarml.com/

JustPaid.io

• Description: JustPaid.io is the AI-powered controller you wish you had earlier, so you will never have to worry about overpaying bills again.
• Founders: Anelya Grant, Daniel Kivatinos, and Vinay Datta Pinnaka
• Link: https://www.justpaid.io/

Lasso

• Description: Traditional automation software is slow and expensive, Lasso is 10X faster and 1/10th the price. It lets operations teams automate using natural language.
• Founders: Gautam Bose and Lucas Ochoa
• Link: https://www.getlassoai.com/

OfOne

• Description: They help fast food restaurants improve operating margins by automating order-taking at the drive-thru.
• Link: https://www.of.one/
• Founders: William Edwards and Adam Proschek

Pair AI

• Description: Pair AI is Shopify for knowledge products. They empower creators, educators, and experts to launch addicting mobile-first video courses and provide AI-assisted coaching services at scale. Our platform is a one-stop shop to seamlessly monetize what you know! They make learning as fun and engaging as watching a TikTok.
• Founders: Parth Detroja and Jason Goodison
• Link: https://www.pairai.com/

pyq

• Description: Pyq makes it easy for developers to build features powered by AI. They do this by identifying specific engineering tasks AI solves well and providing simple APIs that any developer can use within 5 minutes. For example, today they allow developers to build content moderation filters, image captioners for accessibility, image generation and sales call transcribers within minutes.
• Founders: Emily Dorsey and Aman Raghuvanshi
• Link: https://www.pyqai.com/

Rollstack

• Description: Rollstack allows teams to automatically create and update their presentations using data sources such as Tableau, Salesforce, or Looker. They eliminate manual data entry, data stitching from multiple sources, and long formatting time, saving teams time and allowing them to build what they could have never imagined!
• Founders: Saad Bahir, Nabil Jallouli, and Younes Jallouli
• Link: https://www.rollstack.io/

Layup

• Description: Layup is every employee’s AI-powered sidekick that builds workflows across all of their company apps. With just one prompt, it can do things like create an MSA with data from Salesforce, export it to Google Docs, and instantly share it with the right people.
• Founders: Badal Jain, Michael Lemm, and Ryan Xue
• Link: https://www.layupai.com/
  

Linum

• Description: Linum is Midjourney for video, a creative tool that allows anyone to make animated videos starting with just a few prompts.
• Founders: Manu Chopra and Sahil Chopra
• Link: https://www.linum.ai/

Stack AI

• Description: Stack provides the infrastructure to help any team build and deploy applications with LLMs in minutes. Our software provides an interface to compose workflows connecting LLMs, vector databases, and data sources, resulting in a production-ready API.

Squack

• Description: Squack let you streamline your data workflow by building tools with everyday language. They squash the learning curve for RPA tools by enabling users to create and fine-tune automation with plain language. For example, a bookkeeper with no coding experience can use Squack to create a workflow that processes a bank ledger and automatically categorizes transactions in only a few sentences.
• Founders: Eitan Borgnia, Elijah Sorey, and Preston Zhou
• Link: https://www.squack.io/

Rubbrband

• Description: Rubbrband is a CLI tool that enables developers to rapidly experiment with and train the latest open-source ML models. For example, Rubbrband allows you to fine-tune your own version of Dreambooth’s Stable Diffusion in just 1 line of code.
• Founders: Abhinav Gopal, Darren Hsu, and Jeremy Lee
• Link: https://rubbrband.com/

Chima

• Description: Companies struggle to customize their generative AI models by taking advantage of their existing customer and enterprise data, in real time. Chima solves this through a sleek, interoperable layer before the standard generative AI models are applied.
• Founders: Kiara Nirghin and Nikhara Nirghin
• Link: https://www.withchima.com/

AlphaWatch AI

• Description: AlphaWatch AI is a research and analysis tool for hedge funds and private equity firms, providing a reliable chat interface using custom LLMs, specialized embedding models, and data integration. It streamlines research, addresses data fragmentation, reduces costs, and enhances decision-making while ensuring data privacy.
• Founders: Jackson Chen and Varun Varahabhotla
• Link: https://www.alphawatch.ai/
  

Ivy

• Description: Run any ML code, with any ML framework, on any hardware
• Link: https://lets-unify.ai/
• Founder: Daniel Lenton