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Despite an overall decline in startup investing , funding for AI surged in the past twelvemonth . Capital toward productive AI venture alone nearly octupled from 2022 to 2023 , progress to $ 25.2 billion toward the tail oddment of December .
So it ’s not exactly surprising that AI startups dominate at Y Combinator ’s Winter 2024 Demo Day .
The Y Combinator Winter 2024 cohort has 86 AI startup , according to YC ’s official startup directory — nearly double the number from the Winter 2023 spate and stuffy to triple the routine from Winter 2021 . Call it a bubble or overhyped , but clear , AI is the tech of the moment .
As we didlast class , we went through the new Y Combinator age bracket — the cohort submit during this week ’s Demo Day — and picked out some of the more interesting AI startup . Each made the undercut for different understanding . But at a baseline , they stood out among the respite , whether for their engineering science , addressable grocery or founders ’ background .
Hazel
August Chen ( ex - Palantir ) and Elton Lossner ( passe - Boston Consulting Group ) assert that the governance catching process is dispiritedly broken .
Contracts are post to thousands of different site and can include C of pages of overlapping regulations . ( The U.S. Union government alone signs anestimated11 million+ contracts a year . ) Responding to these bids can take the equivalent of whole business variance , affirm by outside consultants and law firm .
Chen ’s and Lossner ’s answer is to employ AI to automate the government catching discovery , drafting and compliance process . The duo — who meet in college — call itHazel .
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Using Hazel , users can get agree to a potential contract bridge , mother a draft response base on the RFP ( postulation for proposal ) and their company ’s information , make a checklist of to - Doctor of Osteopathy and mechanically run compliance checks .
Given AI ’s tendency tohallucinate , I ’m a bit skeptical that Hazel ’s generated responses and check will be systematically accurate . But , if they ’re even close , they could save an tremendous amount of time and endeavour , enable little firms a shot at the 100 of gazillion of dollar ’ worth of governance contracts issued each year .
Andy AI
home plate nurses deal with a heap of paperwork . Tiantian Zha knows this well — she previously work at Verily , the life history sciences division of Google parent companyAlphabet , where she was involved in moonshots tramp from personalized music to reducing mosquito - borne diseases .
In the course of instruction of her work , Zha line up that software documentation was a major clock time sinkhole for at - home nurse . It ’s a far-flung military issue — harmonise to onestudy , nurses spend over a third of their time on corroboration , cut down into time spent on patient fear andcontributing to burnout .
To help ease the documentation loading for nurses , Zha co - foundedAndy AIwith Max Akhterov , a formerApplestaff engineer . Andy is essentially an AI - power scribe , capturing and transcribe the spoken contingent of a patient visit and generate electronic health records .
As with any AI - power transcription pecker , there’srisk of preconception — that is , the shaft not working well for some nanny and patient look on their accents and word of honor choices . And , from a private-enterprise standpoint , Andy is n’t exactly the first of its variety to market — rivals includeDeepScribe , Heidi Health , NablaandAmazon ’s AWS HealthScribe .
But as healthcareincreasinglyshifts to home , the need for apps like Andy AI seems poised to increase .
Precip
If your experience with weather apps is anything like this reporter ’s , you ’ve been captivate in a rainstorm after blindly believing predictions of clear puritanic sky .
But it does n’t have to be this way .
At least , that ’s the assumption of Precip , an AI - power weather prediction program . Jesse Vollmar had the melodic theme after plant FarmLogs , a startup that sold craw management software . He team up with Sam Pierce Lolla and Michael Asher , previously FarmLogs ’ moderate data scientist , to makePrecipa world .
Precip delivers analytics on precipitation — for example , estimating the amount of rain in a give geographic country over the past several time of day to days . Vollmar makes the claim that Precip can generate “ high - precision ” metrics for any location in the U.S. down to the klick ( or two ) , prefigure weather up to seven days forward .
So what ’s the value of haste metrics and alarm ? Well , Vollmar says that farmer can practice them to track crop outgrowth , building crews can reference them to schedule crew , and utilities can tap them to anticipate Robert William Service disruption . One deportation client check Precip daily to avoid bad driving conditions , Vollmar claims .
Of course , there ’s no dearth of weather prevision apps . But AI like Precip ’s promises tomakeforecastsmoreaccurate — if the AI is worth its Strategic Arms Limitation Talks , indeed .
Maia
Claire Wiley launched a couples coaching program while study for her MBA at Wharton . The experience led her to investigate a more technical school - forward-moving approach to human relationship and therapy , which culminated inMaia .
Maia — which Wiley co - establish with Ralph Ma , a former Google research scientist — aims to authorize couple to build stronger relationships through AI - power guidance . In Maia ’s apps for Android and iOS , span message each other in a group chat and answer daily question like what they view as challenge to overcome , past pain points and list of thing that they ’re thankful for .
Maia design to make money by charging for premium features such as programs crafted by therapists and unlimited messaging . ( Maia presently cap texts between partners — a frustratingly arbitrary limitation if you ask me , but so it goes . )
Wiley and Ma , both of whom come from divorced households , say that they worked with a relationship expert to craft the Maia experience . The questions in my mind , though , are ( 1 ) how audio is Maia ’s relationship science and ( 2 ) can it remain firm out in the exceptionally crowd discipline of couples ’ apps ? We ’ll have to wait to see .
Datacurve
The AI manikin at the heart of generative AI apps like ChatGPT are prepare on enormous datasets , mixes of public and proprietary data from around the web , including ebooks , social medium stake and personal blogs . But some of this data is de jure and ethically problematic — not to observe flawed inotherways .
The distinct want of datum curation is the job , if you ask Serena Ge and Charley Lee .
Ge and Lee co - foundedDatacurve , which supply “ expert - quality ” information for develop generative AI models . It ’s specifically computer code data , which Ge and Lee say is peculiarly strong to obtain thanks to the expertise necessary to label it for AI training and restrictive usage licenses .
Datacurve hosts a gamified annotating political platform that make up locomotive engineer to work coding challenges , which contributes to Datacurve ’s for - sale grooming datasets . Those datasets can be used to cultivate models for computer code optimisation , code generation , debugging , UI design and more , Ge and Lee say .
It ’s an interesting idea . But Datacurve ’s success will depend on just how well - curated its datasets are — and whether it ’s capable to incentivize enough devs to keep progress on and ameliorate them .
