Watching from the outside I still can't believe how you Americans just put up with things like this. Why can somebody/something overrule decisions of an actual doctor that has personally examined the patient?!
Insurance appeals is an actual problem though. Medical practices have to hire staff to argue with insurance companies and it increases healthcare costs.
They're already using AI denials, and hiring someone who's technically a doctor to click "no" on all the claims the AI wants to deny, without reading them.
The future is already here. Look at how companies behave today, AI will not change their behaviour. AI will not make them 'nicer'. People talk about the massive productivity change and how we need to think about Universal Basic Income. They don't realize that in the US and other western nations they are already living in abundance (even excess). How do we treat the unemployed and "Unskilled" workforce? Do they have UBI? When they complain about rent and food prices do the wealthy step in to help? Or are they told they should have went to school or acquired a better skill to deserve a better life. What will happen when AI makes while collar workers "unskilled"? The same thing that happens today.
I tend to agree and I think we're seeing a lot of things that historically have led to incredible civil unrest, riots, revolts, revolutions
Maybe the rich and powerful don't know much history. Or maybe they have convinced themselves that this time they will get away with it, because of... Something. Automation? Globalization?
I am not sure. I find myself very frightened of the idea of a massive and violent revolution
What YC company would you consider innovative and groundbreaking - at the stage when they were small enough to be in YC?
Even the massive successes were still essentially novel takes on existing ideas, when they were in YC: Airbnb as Couchsurfing variant; Dropbox as file sharing service with a better UI; Stripe as PayPal but not terrible. Etc.
I wouldn’t really expect the average company at this stage to be groundbreaking.
Since when is YC about innovation? YC (and all VCs) are about maximizing returns for investors. That is NOT innovation, that is mostly rent-seeking. Hence most YC startups are boring B2B SaaS products designed to milk the oceans of freely printed money floating around the American economy.
The trickle-down wealth transfer goes like this: Federal Reserve -> Banks -> Traditional Businesses (who do the hard work of actually providing goods and services people need) -> B2B SaaS that sells them software to replace spreadsheets.
True inventors and innovators tend to be eccentric and purpose-driven rather than money-driven. That is actually a negative signal for YC. They want the slick grifters, popular kids, who can wine and dine clueless execs at "enterprises" to sell them chat apps like Slack at $100/seat. Much easier and faster way to get investor ROI than pie-in-the-sky "innovation".
It is a sensible position. YC and VCs are backing businesses, not charitable causes or research initiatives. It is the founders' responsibility to liaise the two sides in order to signal that the pursuit of their particular purpose is an undeniably attractive and fast-growing investment. Which obviously entails more work and has fewer market opportunities compared to the case "money is the purpose".
After getting backed and receiving adequate funding, all that matters is maintaining a good growth rate to remain a purpose-driven business.
To expand on this, and maybe this point is obvious, but accelerators and VCs purposefully fund a lot of companies they assume will not succeed. Something like 10% success is an acceptable target.
I wonder if all this focus on AI companies is actually denying opportunity to founders who have better ideas? Every AI agent company in YC and other accelerators is one that could have been taken by someone else.
But that’s the thing, AI is the highest risk highest reward opportunity, which fits the VC model. A boring CRUD app that solves an actual problem might be more likely to succeed but less likely to explode into a unicorn.
> For coding, this has started to happen and it's in full swing, what about other domains?
There needs to be a moat. I see all these startups with a moat that is no bigger obstacle than a puddle.
A local (geographically to myself) pre-LLM (Convolutional Neural Network) company invested in a huge moat, building a large training set of human labeled data ... I knew the moment I saw an LLM that could ingest image that their moat had evaporated in an instant. A lot of the technical staff either left or lost their jobs but the company appears to be limping on hoping for an exit.
If a startup depends on a secret prompt and a few MCP servers, they have no moat.
I think the next wave of AI-based SaaS (rather than pure AI API providers) will be companies like the Legal IDE (Tritium [1]), recently featured on the homepage. Tools that innovate and use AI, but would still be innovate even without it.
[1] I have no affiliation whatsoever. I just liked the demo and the concept.
I was talking to Jeff Lawson the other day and he said something really interesting I hadn't really considered the nuance. I always considered Twilio, DigitalOcean, Sendgrid etc "dev tools" - but Jeff said I was wrong and they are supply chain primitives/components. DevTools are more like IDEs in this lens.
Only reason I bring it up is related to your moat comment. supply chain stuff is tied into workflow that becomes institutionalized, and typically more b2b, dev tools are more like b2c, so you really have to compete on merits hard, moats of b2c2b look to Slack or anything with seats/licenses/team features.
In the new AI world we can see it starting to emerge, on one hand you have something like Cursor, on the other something like charlielabs.ai - Will be interesting to see how it all plays out, but I wanted to just add some nuance I've been thinking about recently. :)
(full disclosure I'm considering joining charlie labs, don't want to be accused of shilling later if I do.)
Have they done that? In my opinion they’ve built an AI IDE consisting of 90% forked open source code that has an identical experience to competitors with less of a chance to integrate with big tech Google/Microsoft/Apple-style ecosystem products.
The “step one: get user data, step two: ???, step 3: profit” business model is well established, and it definitely doesn’t always work.
You are being overly negative here. No one said they are doing something groundbreaking. If they were doing something groundbreaking with credibility, they wouldn't be giving away 7% to YC at $2M valuation. All the big AI folks who are "aiming" to do something groundbreaking are raising at 500 times that.
I think there are more factors than just how groundbreaking their ambitions are that justify different valuations.
Like brands, customer count, contracts, hardware access, headcount, and existing progress.
Thinking openai is worth more than a day1 startup only because they are more ambitious requires all their years of funding, progress, bd, sales, and brand have little value. In my opinion these things matter a lot more than long term ambitions (which always change in response to the market anyway).
I am not talking about OpenAI. I am talking about 5 person startups like SSI which are valued >$1B in day 1 without brand, contracts or hardware access.
Is anyone else sick of hearing "AI agent"? I can't fully explain the feeling, but it's nauseating. Y Combinator is probably the worst culprit in using it, especially on their YouTube channel.
Nope. It is the same as getting sick of hearing "new JS framework" before there was a real new JS framework fatigue. Or: get used, it's just the beginning.
https://archive.md/OgCkl
>automates the insurance appeals process for healthcare providers to appeal and win denied health insurance claims
This is hilarious and soul killing at the same time. The AIs are going to argue with each other over whether or not a human gets health care.
Watching from the outside I still can't believe how you Americans just put up with things like this. Why can somebody/something overrule decisions of an actual doctor that has personally examined the patient?!
This is really emblematic of what Y Combinator is these days.
No one there is interested or capable of solving actual problems. They just want to be another middleman leeching value.
Insurance appeals is an actual problem though. Medical practices have to hire staff to argue with insurance companies and it increases healthcare costs.
They're already using AI denials, and hiring someone who's technically a doctor to click "no" on all the claims the AI wants to deny, without reading them.
It's stuff like this that makes me want to puke when I hear people talking about how great the AI future is going to be
AI is a force multiplier.
Forces can be applied in a negative direction too, and often are
The future is already here. Look at how companies behave today, AI will not change their behaviour. AI will not make them 'nicer'. People talk about the massive productivity change and how we need to think about Universal Basic Income. They don't realize that in the US and other western nations they are already living in abundance (even excess). How do we treat the unemployed and "Unskilled" workforce? Do they have UBI? When they complain about rent and food prices do the wealthy step in to help? Or are they told they should have went to school or acquired a better skill to deserve a better life. What will happen when AI makes while collar workers "unskilled"? The same thing that happens today.
I tend to agree and I think we're seeing a lot of things that historically have led to incredible civil unrest, riots, revolts, revolutions
Maybe the rich and powerful don't know much history. Or maybe they have convinced themselves that this time they will get away with it, because of... Something. Automation? Globalization?
I am not sure. I find myself very frightened of the idea of a massive and violent revolution
Trump vs California is a preview and a test.
Seems like "Uber for X" turned into "Cursor for X".
Trying hard not to be negative. But do any of these innovative in a groundbreaking way?
What YC company would you consider innovative and groundbreaking - at the stage when they were small enough to be in YC?
Even the massive successes were still essentially novel takes on existing ideas, when they were in YC: Airbnb as Couchsurfing variant; Dropbox as file sharing service with a better UI; Stripe as PayPal but not terrible. Etc.
I wouldn’t really expect the average company at this stage to be groundbreaking.
Boom Aerospace
Good answer.
Cloudflare.
Not a YC company…
Since when is YC about innovation? YC (and all VCs) are about maximizing returns for investors. That is NOT innovation, that is mostly rent-seeking. Hence most YC startups are boring B2B SaaS products designed to milk the oceans of freely printed money floating around the American economy.
The trickle-down wealth transfer goes like this: Federal Reserve -> Banks -> Traditional Businesses (who do the hard work of actually providing goods and services people need) -> B2B SaaS that sells them software to replace spreadsheets.
True inventors and innovators tend to be eccentric and purpose-driven rather than money-driven. That is actually a negative signal for YC. They want the slick grifters, popular kids, who can wine and dine clueless execs at "enterprises" to sell them chat apps like Slack at $100/seat. Much easier and faster way to get investor ROI than pie-in-the-sky "innovation".
> … purpose-driven rather than money-driven […] is actually a negative signal for YC.
You can even find that in PG's “essays”, although he doesn't say it that directly.
It is a sensible position. YC and VCs are backing businesses, not charitable causes or research initiatives. It is the founders' responsibility to liaise the two sides in order to signal that the pursuit of their particular purpose is an undeniably attractive and fast-growing investment. Which obviously entails more work and has fewer market opportunities compared to the case "money is the purpose".
After getting backed and receiving adequate funding, all that matters is maintaining a good growth rate to remain a purpose-driven business.
To expand on this, and maybe this point is obvious, but accelerators and VCs purposefully fund a lot of companies they assume will not succeed. Something like 10% success is an acceptable target.
I wonder if all this focus on AI companies is actually denying opportunity to founders who have better ideas? Every AI agent company in YC and other accelerators is one that could have been taken by someone else.
But that’s the thing, AI is the highest risk highest reward opportunity, which fits the VC model. A boring CRUD app that solves an actual problem might be more likely to succeed but less likely to explode into a unicorn.
Feels like we're at the stage where models are good enough, the missing piece is tooling which still needs to catch up to make full use of them.
For coding, this has started to happen and it's in full swing, what about other domains?
> For coding, this has started to happen and it's in full swing, what about other domains?
There needs to be a moat. I see all these startups with a moat that is no bigger obstacle than a puddle.
A local (geographically to myself) pre-LLM (Convolutional Neural Network) company invested in a huge moat, building a large training set of human labeled data ... I knew the moment I saw an LLM that could ingest image that their moat had evaporated in an instant. A lot of the technical staff either left or lost their jobs but the company appears to be limping on hoping for an exit.
If a startup depends on a secret prompt and a few MCP servers, they have no moat.
I think the next wave of AI-based SaaS (rather than pure AI API providers) will be companies like the Legal IDE (Tritium [1]), recently featured on the homepage. Tools that innovate and use AI, but would still be innovate even without it.
[1] I have no affiliation whatsoever. I just liked the demo and the concept.
I was talking to Jeff Lawson the other day and he said something really interesting I hadn't really considered the nuance. I always considered Twilio, DigitalOcean, Sendgrid etc "dev tools" - but Jeff said I was wrong and they are supply chain primitives/components. DevTools are more like IDEs in this lens.
Only reason I bring it up is related to your moat comment. supply chain stuff is tied into workflow that becomes institutionalized, and typically more b2b, dev tools are more like b2c, so you really have to compete on merits hard, moats of b2c2b look to Slack or anything with seats/licenses/team features.
In the new AI world we can see it starting to emerge, on one hand you have something like Cursor, on the other something like charlielabs.ai - Will be interesting to see how it all plays out, but I wanted to just add some nuance I've been thinking about recently. :)
(full disclosure I'm considering joining charlie labs, don't want to be accused of shilling later if I do.)
> There needs to be a moat.
Why does there need to be a moat? You don't believe in markets and competition?
> There needs to be a moat. I see all these startups with a moat that is no bigger obstacle than a puddle.
Cursor doesn’t have a moat. And yet…
Cursor's moat is it's user's data.
they have SOTA completion models (bought NineTab, founder left already, but still).
Cursor moat is they're the touch point with customers, not the big labs. imo
they can use all that data to better improve the ux/ui and piggyback on general models improvements
Have they done that? In my opinion they’ve built an AI IDE consisting of 90% forked open source code that has an identical experience to competitors with less of a chance to integrate with big tech Google/Microsoft/Apple-style ecosystem products.
The “step one: get user data, step two: ???, step 3: profit” business model is well established, and it definitely doesn’t always work.
The guys right in front of the user usually win. The rest are just price-sensitive commodity.
The difference is that this time the price sensitive commodity is right in front of the customer with very little value surrounding it.
[flagged]
I can't find any results searching for "POTDEZ", was that a typo or could you clarify what you meant?
[flagged]
Ah, hadn't occurred to me that it might be a zero-humour joke.
much like your replies lmao
> Trying hard not to be negative.
You are being overly negative here. No one said they are doing something groundbreaking. If they were doing something groundbreaking with credibility, they wouldn't be giving away 7% to YC at $2M valuation. All the big AI folks who are "aiming" to do something groundbreaking are raising at 500 times that.
I think there are more factors than just how groundbreaking their ambitions are that justify different valuations.
Like brands, customer count, contracts, hardware access, headcount, and existing progress.
Thinking openai is worth more than a day1 startup only because they are more ambitious requires all their years of funding, progress, bd, sales, and brand have little value. In my opinion these things matter a lot more than long term ambitions (which always change in response to the market anyway).
I am not talking about OpenAI. I am talking about 5 person startups like SSI which are valued >$1B in day 1 without brand, contracts or hardware access.
[dead]
Is anyone else sick of hearing "AI agent"? I can't fully explain the feeling, but it's nauseating. Y Combinator is probably the worst culprit in using it, especially on their YouTube channel.
Nope. It is the same as getting sick of hearing "new JS framework" before there was a real new JS framework fatigue. Or: get used, it's just the beginning.
Congratulations to the founders on this batch!
Original title edited for length:
The 10 most exciting AI agent startups at Y Combinator's Demo Day for its first-ever spring cohort
https://archive.is/OgCkl