Here’s a crazy statistic: More than half of the companies in Y Combinator’s latest cohort were accepted to the accelerator with only an idea, no minimum viable product or revenue strategy needed.
Fast forward to today, where we’ll see how the individuals behind those ideas are thinking about the future of how we work, eat, connect and build. YC Demo Day is always a window into a subset of entrepreneurs, used to help us better understand how this world may play into the kinds of companies entering the market.
Before we get into some standout companies, here’s some background on the latest batch: The most common verticals were developer operations, open source and artificial intelligence. On the diversity front, YC says that 17% of the Winter 2023 companies have a woman founder, which is up from 15% in the previous batch.
OK, let’s start! Now, there’s a reason we are journalists, not investors, so let’s be clear: What we’ve written on the startups listed below are not meant as advice to join or back a startup; we’re highlighting which companies stood out to us during the rapid-fire pitching of Y Combinator’s 36th Demo Day.
OutSail
Details: Fuel-saving sails for cargo ships that pop up out of shipping containers.
Why it’s a fave: The engineering required to pull this off seems beyond what a small, early-stage team is capable of actually building and testing, but I love to highlight ambitious and forward-thinking ideas. These big old sails expanding out of containers to give huge ships a bit of free propulsion would add up to a lot of saved fuel, and everyone is looking to give that kind of thing a shot right now. At the very least they can explore this possibility. If it’s successful, great; if not, it also counts as research in service of another, better option.
Who picked it: Devin Coldewey
Linum
Details: Linum’s pitch is that users can use AI to create videos that are simple to “iterate,” per its website.
Why it’s a fave: It’s a standout for me for two reasons: one positive, one negative. On the exciting side of the coin, I am not an animator. I can’t make a cool video for any of the creative ideas (fiction, in other words) that I have bouncing around my head. Perhaps Linum and startups like it will give me superpowers. The flip side is that it’s hard to tell at our present distance just how much of the tech is proprietary versus off-the-shelf. This is not a knock against just Linum, however. A lot of really neat AI tools are being built today using existing tech from larger companies. How the startups will create an in-market edge is going to be a fascinating, if perhaps difficult, question that we’ll see answered in the next few quarters.
But let’s not get too bogged down: This looks neat, and neat things that we want to use right away smell like budding product-market fit.
Who picked it: Alex Wilhelm
Yeah, of course, YC’s winter class is oozing with AI companies
222
Details: Three co-founders have teamed up to build 222, a social events app that aims to turn strangers into friends through real-life experiences. It charges $22 per user per experience and already has more than $15,000 in monthly revenue, per the company. Read our full story about the startup here.
Why it’s a fave: I resonate with this startup both emotionally and rationally. First, I have tons of friends who are looking for more ways to platonically meet up with others outside of tech happy hours and secret AI hackathons. And second, the startup emphasized in its Demo Day pitch that it is not hosting these events itself: 222 is solely a software company that helps connect venues with eager cohorts of people. That screams scale and at least some de-risk from yet another hacker house community that promotes exclusivity.
Who picked it: Natasha Mascarenhas
Kurukuru
Details: Software that helps folks who cannot draw well create comics in various styles using a web editor.
Why it’s a fave: I love to draw. I am also about as talented at drawing as I am at, say, operating an oil rig. But that hasn’t historically stopped me from creating my own comics. From aping different Batman series in my youth to creating a comic series in middle school that allowed me to goof off and draw during study periods, I dig the format and the art.
If Kurukuru works as well as its onsite demo makes it seem, I can imagine taking ideas from my head and creating really neat and far-higher-quality-than-I-could-do-with-a-pen comics for my own enjoyment. Precisely where Kurukuru will sit in the market (prosumer, perhaps?) is not clear, but using tech to unlock human creativity will never be out of fashion in my book.
Oh, and it would be cool if Kurukuru created a marketplace where the artistically impaired like me could get more pro-doodlers to draw and create the custom characters that we need for our sagas. This sounds so fun!
Who picked it: Alex Wilhelm
SensorSurf
Details: Describing itself as “Snowflake for sensor data,” SensorSurf wants to help robotics companies collect, manage and search sensor and system data from their fleet. Its first clients are Volley Automation (the automated parking one) and Fox Robotics.
Why it’s a fave: Robots collect a lot of data through their sensors, and that is only set to increase. A data infrastructure specifically focused on that niche sounds promising. I also found it interesting that SensorSurf was one of two companies pitching that presented itself as Snowflake for X. (The other one was Arroyo, a “Snowflake for real-time data.”)
Who picked it: Anna Heim
Bluedot
Details: It’s a credit card that helps drivers tame the tangle of EV charging networks.
Why it’s a fave: Non-Tesla EV charging is a mess, and part of the problem is how to pay for it. Currently, most EV chargers in the U.S. don’t have credit card readers, forcing users to download apps for each network they use. Plus, charging rates can vary significantly. Bluedot users can pay for charging sessions at a range of networks with its app, and its credit card offers flat-fee charging at participating networks and rebates and nearby retailers. Bluedot isn’t quite enough to solve all of EV charging’s problems, but it’s a good start.
Who picked it: Tim De Chant
Momentum Foods
Details: Momentum Foods wants to bring the meat back to plant-based meat alternatives; literally.
Why it’s a fave: I chose to give Momentum Foods a shoutout because it simply wasn’t on my YC bingo board, which is usually full of Stanford references and Brex shoutouts. It’s literally meat-based, plant-based meat plants; which is sure to stir up controversy. Is it a step back for the alt-meat movement? Is it a step forward for an industry looking for more adoption? Or is it a step sideways, a product more realistically meeting consumers where it is? As someone who puts paneer and tofu into my dishes, I love the idea of mixing up the fattier content foods with the lean to trick my mind and take care of my body. But as a vegetarian, I’m obviously biased on how meat alternatives should plant.
Who picked it: Natasha Mascarenhas
Upfront
Details: By handling messy post-sale work of filing for government and utility incentives, Upfront allows retailers and contractors to sell EV chargers to consumers at a lower price point.
Why it’s a fave: Anyone who has submitted for a rebate knows what a pain in the ass they are. Rebates for electrification are perhaps worse. Customers might be eligible for thousands of dollars back, but those incentives are hidden across a range of utilities and government offices. The company is starting with EV chargers, which often cost north of $500 for the unit alone. Making that more affordable should help boost uptake of electric vehicles.
Who picked it: Tim De Chant
Auricle
Details: A reversible surgery and implant to restore hearing as an alternative to cochlear implants.
Why it’s a fave: This has a lot of unknowns, and it may be too early to really say whether this is a valid approach. But I value a startup looking at a population as large and diverse as people with hearing loss and saying, “What is an alternative to something people have no choice about?” While surgery is by definition difficult and invasive, it may be preferable for some and the only choice for others. I look forward to hearing more about Auricle, even if it’s a supremely risky basis on which to build a business at this point.
Who picked it: Devin Coldewey
Rivet
Details: A standard toolset for setting up multiplayer game servers so developers can focus on the game itself.
Why it’s a fave: This is just an incredibly common complaint in the indie gaming development world. Everybody would love to add co-op or a fun PvP option to their game, but it’s super hard! So much goes into the multiplayer stack, and lots of small devs can’t afford the labor and time since they’re already super cash starved and overworked. Rivet isn’t the only company looking at this, but I support new efforts aimed at helping independent developers, which are kind of like the early-stage startups of the gaming world.
Who picked it: Devin Coldewey
Palomma
Details: Account-to-account payments for Latin America.
Why it’s a fave: Several YC companies mentioned wanting to rid the world of credit cards, but Palomma is going after the 75% of Latin Americans who don’t have a card to begin with. Instead, it enables merchants to accept account-to-account payments and avoid those pesky card fees. It seems to have resonated: Just three weeks after launch, Palomma has an 85% conversion rate from customers with 20 merchants signed on, even touting one of LatAm’s largest fashion retailers in this group.
Who picked it: Christine Hall
Second
Details: Developers waste time writing code for commodity features and integrations. Second wants to change that by providing bots that write code and raise pull requests for common web application features.
Why it’s a fave: Second launched just three weeks ago, but it has already gathered quite a bit of attention on Hacker News and Product Hunt, so I’m not the only one interested in seeing if it can deliver on its promise to reduce the amount of “grunt work” that devs have to do. Second-time YC founder Eric Rowell says his new startup is already serving three paying customers and doing four closed betas with large public companies, so there’s clearly a B2B SaaS market opportunity here. But it is also nice to see that its pricing includes a free tier “for founders and hobbyists who need a starter web application foundation.”
Who picked it: Anna Heim
Electric Air
Details: The guy who made the heat pump for Teslas is trying to make the Tesla of heat pumps.
Why it’s a fave: Heat pumps, already popular in other countries, are going to be an enormous growth market in the U.S. thanks to the incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act. Electric Air is up against some stiff competition — my home’s large Mitsubishi unit has been flawless over five years of heating and cooling — but the demand is likely to be so big that there will be a sizable opening for newcomers.
Who picked it: Tim De Chant
Viddy
Details: A video CMS for e-commerce brands.
Why it’s a fave: Yes, social commerce hasn’t exactly caught on in the U.S., but thanks to TikTok, videos are America’s new favorite pastime. So if you’re an e-commerce brand, that means you’re going to have to make some videos. And organize them. And find them. And curate them. Case in point, Viddy’s 13 customers are increasing sales by 18% on average.
Who picked it: Christine Hall
Forfeit
Details: Forfeit takes your money and doesn’t give it back unless you prove you have accomplished certain goals, like going to the gym or finishing a project.
Why it’s a fave: I can’t tell you how many times in my life I have thought, “You know what would be a great service a lot of people would use, yet somehow just amounts to them giving you money for no reason?” Well, that is Forfeit, and it’s not even pretending there’s anything more to it than that. I think that’s great, but the challenge is how to scale the verification thing beyond “send us a picture and we look at it.” Integrations, perhaps?
Who picked it: Devin Coldewey
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