Latest news with #YC-backed
Time of India
14-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Y Combinator to court: Google's search empire is a 'monopoly by cheque book, not ...'
Startup accelerator Y Combinator (YC) has labeled Google a " monopolist " that has "stunted" the US startup ecosystem in an amicus brief filed May 9 in the government's ongoing antitrust case against the search giant. YC charged that Google has "chilled independent firms like YC from funding and accelerating innovative startups that could otherwise have challenged Google's dominance," creating what it calls a "kill zone" that deters venture capital investment in potential Google competitors. "The result is a landscape that has been artificially stunted and stagnant," YC wrote in its filing. YC proposes remedies, not immediate breakup of Google Despite the harsh criticism, YC CEO Garry Tan clarified that the organization isn't calling for Google's immediate dismantling. "We love Google and what it represents as a paragon of US-led tech and innovation . We also want to make sure the excesses of big tech make way for tomorrow's little tech," Tan wrote on social media following the brief's submission. YC proposes several remedies, including ending Google's practice of paying billions to be the default search engine on devices like iPhones and opening Google's search index for competitors to train large language models. "We are not calling for a breakup of Google," Tan emphasized. "If anything we hope that a measured and thoughtful remedy between USG and Google from here (5 year term!) means a court-supervised spin-off is contingent, and a last resort." Google's has created distribution barriers YC argues Google's dominance creates nearly insurmountable barriers for startups entering the search market. "Google's 90% search dominion is a ladder-pull for startups. Exclusive default contracts commandeer >50% of search routes, Chrome grabs another 20%. That's 70% of distribution sealed off before a startup even ships v1," Tan wrote, calling it "Monopoly by checkbook [cheque book], not merit." The brief comes at a critical time as the government considers potential remedies after Google lost its antitrust case last year. Proposed penalties could include requiring Google to divest parts of its business if it doesn't implement changes within five years. "VC investment in a sector drops about 40% after a big tech consolidation/acquisition," Tan noted. "Founders aren't asking for a handout or a leg up. They want a level playing field, which we don't have." YC's stance may surprise some given its recent partnerships with Google, including access to dedicated GPU clusters for YC startups and Google's acquisitions of YC-backed companies Flutter and Fridge. "We want Google to succeed and we also want the next Google to succeed," Tan concluded.
Business Insider
26-04-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Networking the right way can help make your own luck in your career, says this former Meta engineer
Rahul Pandey, former staff engineer at Meta, credits much of his career trajectory to good fortune. But you can still make your own luck — at least in part. "You can manufacture luck in the sense of being curious about the people and the opportunities around you," Pandey said on an episode of " The Developing Dev" podcast. Pandey's path through tech started right out of college, when he joined a startup run by one of his former professors at Stanford. From there, he bounced from Pinterest to Meta, where he eventually climbed to staff engineer before leaving to start Taro, a YC-backed startup that offers career coaching to software engineers. To line up those kinds of opportunities takes a degree of luck, Pandey acknowledged. But they're more likely to come if you develop a network — and do it by being genuine, he said. By reaching out on the basis of real curiosity and making sure you have something to share, you can avoid making a cold reach-out feel clinical. "Me doing a lot of the job hops in my career have come from just, again, being kind of in the know on — what are the people doing that I respect?" he said. "And so I think that can be a repeatable algorithm or repeatable process that's not dependent on luck. Just change your approach to networking or talking to people, and that's a really good way to manufacture luck." If your conversations feel stilted, Pandey suggests evaluating whether there's an equal balance of give-and-take. "I do think that one of the best ways to develop a relationship with someone is not just by asking a ton of questions or asking for mentorship," he said. "A really good way to develop a relationship is say, 'Hey, here's something I've worked on which might be interesting to you.'" Pandey said the strategy of "being thoughtful about what are you sharing" makes the speaker more likely to build productive relationships. "You create gravity," he said. "People gravitate toward you because they want to get your opinion on things, too. So it's like a two-way street." When first deciding to start his career at a fledgling company, Pandey said he felt it was a high-risk, high-reward option. On the one hand, "it could go really, really well," he said; but even in the worst case, it'd be a "good story to tell." "I felt like it was almost too good of a story to pass up. I could be one of 10,000 or 20,000 engineers in Big Tech if I go join Google or Microsoft or Meta — and I had received offers at all of them," Pandey said. "But then I felt like, okay, this is a story where I had this connection, relationship with the professor. He trusts me, I trust him, and it just feels like a Silicon Valley unique story." Pandey said he used a decision-making framework of thinking of his career paths being either a one-way or a two-way door. That helped him decide between gambling on a startup or going the more traditional (and usually more secure) route of signing on with a big-name company. "Most things in your career are two-way doors, in the sense that you try it out, you learn something, you experiment, and then you can always back out," he said. "You can always decide to leave the startup and then go to Big Tech if needed, so that was one consideration.'" Another consideration: Pandey had already taken on an internship with Meta the summer before his graduation and felt like he'd already earned a level of "approval" from Big Tech. Also important, he added, was the "often overlooked" storytelling potential of the riskier route. "The narrative that you can create about what you did, why you did it, and why it's interesting — that is incredibly powerful," Pandey said. He got a lot of mileage out of being able to describe his experience as an "enterprising young engineer" who "took a bet on a startup," he added. When you're on the precipice of a big career decision, Pandey suggested it could be useful to consider what might eventually be the better story. Those opportunities, he added, are typically the ones that allow you to meet more people and take on unique responsibilities. "One of the things I tell people, on Taro or just in general when I mentor people, is that if you have a choice between A and B, and you feel like A is the one which will give you exposure to more unique opportunity, unique people, unique stories — that's a really good argument to pick option A," Pandey said, "because it just will broaden your perspective and give you that storytelling ability."
Forbes
21-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
High School Dropout Launches VibeGrade To Help Teachers Grade Faster
Musa Aqeel, Co-Founder of VibeGrad, and Daniel Martinez, Founder of VibeGrad Vibegrade, a YC-backed startup using AI to help teachers deliver high-quality feedback in their own style, 10x faster, announces its public launch today. The company works directly inside Google Docs, Google Classroom, and Canvas, reading and annotating essays based on the teacher's rubric — just like a teacher would. Already saving over 500 school days of manual grading across 12,000 papers, Vibegrade learns from each teacher's style to deliver feedback that actually helps students improve. It doesn't replace teachers — it helps teachers help their students, to make education better for everyone. The startup was founded by 18-year-old high school dropout Daniel Martinez and 19-year-old Musa Aqeel, a second-year college student who also dropped out to go all-in on building AI for teachers to grade papers faster. The two met in high school and had been building side projects together ever since—one of their earliest was a tool that let partygoers scan a QR code and add songs to a shared Spotify queue. 'I've always cared a lot about education. I just think the way we do it right now is super outdated. It doesn't work well for the teachers or for the students—because students aren't able to get the feedback they need to improve, and teachers are overwhelmed', Daniel says. Daniel, who has been coding since age 10, always knew he wanted to build a company. For him, the path to impact was through tech. Together with Musa, they set out to improve—not replace—educators by giving them superpowers through AI. And the early demand proves the need: all 72 of their current customers are paying out of pocket. If you think it's pure luck to get accepted to YC at this age, you're wrong. Together, they applied to YC five times before being accepted. It wasn't their first attempt—they'd been working hard to make it happen, testing out different ideas and product iterations.'We were on a FaceTime call when we got the email about the interview', Musa recalls. 'We were shocked but also ready.' A major turning point was when Musa officially joined as co-founder. 'YC looks at the people, not just the product,' he says. 'Daniel had been building great stuff on his own, but having a partner makes the startup journey less lonely and more resilient.' Daniel and Musa believe that YC saw the energy they brought as a team—their history of building useful products together, the traction they'd achieved, and their commitment to solving a real pain point in education. They also believe the timing is right. Martinez adds, 'When I first started, there was a lot of skepticism about AI in education. Nobody wanted to touch it. Now there's been a major shift in sentiment, and everyone's starting to use it more. It's a big opportunity.' As you might expect, leaving school wasn't an easy conversation. 'I told my dad this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity', Musa Aqeel says. 'At first, he was skeptical. He has a degree and believed in the traditional path. But once he looked into YC and saw the companies that came out of it, he understood the value.' Daniel's mom was supportive from day one. 'She knew how much I'd been building over the years, and when I finally got into YC, she was just happy for me.' Both Daniel and Musa faced a lot of skepticism back in school and college—from classmates, teachers, and friends. Daniel explains, 'I only had four credits left. I told them I was going to San Francisco for three months to build a company, and I gave them the acceptance letter. They said, 'Oh, that's cool—congrats—but since you won't be in the country or taking classes, we can't let you stay.' Surprisingly, Daniel's own teachers were not the first to use or test the product—despite his efforts, he never heard back from them. Some even expressed concerns about using AI for this purpose. 'It's really hard to build when nobody believes in you,' Musa says. 'When the people around you aren't supportive, you have to focus on what matters to you—and just keep building.' Today, VibeGrade is being used in schools across the country, saving teachers hours each week. As attitudes toward AI in education continue to evolve, demand is growing fast. Failure doesn't scare them. 'We've failed before', Daniel Martinez says. They believe the mentorship, guidance, and experience of being in YC—surrounded by other founders—will help them grow tremendously in the coming months. And they're confident the lessons they're learning will stay with them for the rest of their careers. 'It's definitely not going to be the last thing we ever do', Musa is convinved. As VibeGrade enters its next chapter, Daniel and Musa are focused on scale—bringing their AI-powered feedback tool to more classrooms and more educators nationwide. With a clear mission, growing traction, and the backing of Y Combinator, they're not just reimagining how grading works—they're helping reshape the role of teachers in the age of AI. In a world where innovation often overlooks the classroom, VibeGrade is proving that transformative tech can—and should—start with education.
Forbes
14-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
YC-Backed Octolane Raises Seed To Build The Next AI Salesforce
One Chowdhury, Co-founder & CEO, and Md Abdul Halim Rafi, Co-founder & CTO Octolane, the YC-backed startup behind the world's first self-driving AI CRM, today announced a $2.6 million oversubscribed seed round to take on Salesforce and reinvent the CRM category. Founded by two young immigrants, Octolane is building an AI-native system that eliminates manual CRM work and automates sales actions out of the box. The round includes investors like Brian Shin (early investor in HubSpot and Drift), Kulveer Taggar, Cindy Bi (CapitalX), Dave Messina (Pioneer Fund), Lan Xuezhao (Basis Set Ventures), Arash Ferdowsi, and General Catalyst Apex — all betting on Octolane to replace legacy, clunky CRMs with a faster, automated future built for modern sales teams. Inside a San Francisco coffee shop Cafe Reveille, co-founder and CEO One Chowdhury, 23, is multitasking — reviewing pull requests between customer calls, a coffee-stained white shirt as his uniform. It's a typical Saturday, which he claims is statistically the most productive day at Octolane. Since dropping out of Duke University and moving to the Bay Area, this kind of hustle has become his normal — and investors are taking notice, calling the company 'Salesforce if it were built in the AI era.' What makes this CRM startup stand out in a market dominated by industry giants is its reinvention of what a CRM actually does, transforming it from a passive 'System of Record' that demands constant manual updates into an intelligent 'System of Actions' that predicts and executes the next steps needed to close deals. "The problem with traditional CRMs is they're glorified databases that force sales teams to spend hours manually entering data after every customer interaction. Most reps hate using them because they create work rather than reducing it", explains Md Abdul Halim Rafi, Octolane's co-founder and CTO. Octolane's approach is fundamentally different, built around three core capabilities that no other CRM can deliver: What's particularly impressive about Octolane's approach is its fine tuned LLM using synthetic data generation. This makes it possible to have a sophisticated architecture that goes beyond simply using OpenAI's GPT-4. "We've developed a hybrid approach", Rafi explains. "We combine OpenAI's capabilities with our Octolane Driver 3 model that's been specifically fine tuned on over 200,000 sales simulations." This custom model specializes in understanding sales conversations, extracting structured data from unstructured text, and identifying subtle buying signals that most experienced salesperson might miss. The system ingests multi-modal customer interaction data, processes it through this specialized AI stack, and creates comprehensive "customer state vectors" – structured representations of each customer's current needs, concerns, and engagement context. What's particularly striking about Octolane's strategy is its deliberately contrarian approach to the market. While most startups avoid direct confrontation with industry giants, Octolane is explicitly targeting companies already locked into established CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce - the equivalent of walking into a lion's den wearing steak-scented cologne. "Everyone told me - and still tells me - that I'm completely delusional", One admits with a smile. 'Multiple potential investors said, 'You can't go after customers who are already locked into CRM systems. The switching costs are too high, and those companies have massive sales and marketing engines that will crush you." He recalls one prominent VC who declined to invest, telling him bluntly, "It would be easier to convince people to switch religions than to switch from Salesforce". Chowdhury now occasionally begins his sales demo with this quote — usually followed by a series of screenshots showing dozens of customers doing exactly that. Rather than chasing new companies with no existing CRM, Octolane deliberately positioned itself as a jailbreak for companies trapped in CRM prison. This David versus Goliath approach — which most industry experts considered suicidal — has proven remarkably effective. Of Octolane's 200 onboarded customers (with another 5,000 companies on the waitlist), the majority have defected from established players like HubSpot and Pipedrive, with several in the process of escaping Salesforce's ecosystem — something that industry veterans considered nearly impossible just a year ago. This mission-driven obsession has created a working culture that feels like a time machine to Silicon Valley's earlier days. Octolane's Slack channels buzz at 3 AM. Morning standups happen on Sundays. Code reviews occur at midnight. Seven-day workweeks aren't mandated — they're volunteered. In Silicon Valley, where work-life balance has become a recruiting tool, Octolane stands as a throwback to the Valley's forgotten religion - obsession. "This isn't about 'grinding' or 'hustle culture,'" One explains. 'We're eliminating what might be the most soul-crushing part of modern work life: CRM data entry. That's worth missing some weekends because we don't want another sales rep missing their daughter's recital to update 47 fields in Salesforce.' That mission has yielded real results. This investment in synthetic data has produced remarkable results and proves that they're onto something. In head to head testing in a controlled environment, Octolane's system achieved a 12% customer response rate - more than double the industry average of just 5.1% according to Belkins' 2024 analysis of over 6 million B2B emails. The system nearly doubled meeting booking success rates (10% versus the typical 5% for lower-intent leads reported in Crunchbase's 2023 Conversion Benchmark Study), while dramatically reducing administrative burden by 80% - transforming what HubSpot Research identifies as one of sales teams' biggest pain points by cutting CRM management time from approximately 5 hours to just 1.5 hours per lead. What's most unusual about Octolane's $2.6 million round isn't just who invested, but the strategy behind it. "We tried to raise as little as possible", One explains with characteristic frugality. "Initially, we planned to raise just $2 million including YC funding. But then something strange happened." That "something strange" was a flood of interest from major venture capital firms that Octolane largely resisted. The round was led by VitalStage Ventures' Brian Shin, an early investor in both Drift and HubSpot. Fondo's CEO David J. Phillips — one of Octolane's first users — wrote a check the day after One landed in San Francisco. Octolane's cap table also includes powerhouses like Cindy Bi, Lan Xuezhao, and Kulveer Taggar — all first-generation immigrants like the founders. One says, "They didn't just commit to taking care of our company, they committed to taking care of us.' He continues, 'These aren't just any investors, but individuals who bring extraordinary expertise to Octolane's corner.' For example, Cindy Bi, has developed a reputation for her uncanny ability to spot unicorns early, backing 14 billion dollar companies, 12 of them from seed stage. She says, 'It's very obvious that Octolane has a very strong market pull from customers of all sizes that are eager to switch from HubSpot and that's how an AI-first Salesforce should be: a system of actions, not just records. Each interaction I've had with the team boosts my confidence because you can tell that nothing can stop them from 'earning" more customers from this $300B market cap opportunity." Kulveer Taggar, a 2X YC founder with 2 exits (Auctomatic W07 and later Zeus in S11) mentions, 'What drew me to Octolane was their rare combination of customer obsession and extraordinary output. They're constantly shipping improvements based on real user feedback. One and Rafi understand that retention is the true north star in this space, and they've been bold enough to tackle the CRM category with genuinely fresh thinking. Seeing fast-growing companies switch to their platform validates that this approach is exactly what the market has been waiting for.' One Chowdhury's transparent "building in public" approach has been key to the company's rapid growth. In an era where startups operate in stealth mode until the "big reveal," One has taken the opposite approach - sharing every win, setbacks, existential doubts, and 3AM coding breakthroughs on X and LinkedIn with unfiltered honesty. These aren't polished marketing messages but raw dispatches from the startup - complete with coffee stains, typos, and occasional frustrations. The result? Thousands of followers who feel like virtual co-founders, emotionally invested in Octolane's success. "It's One's daily company updates on Twitter that caught my attention," says Octolane's early investor Cindy Bi, "I quickly visited Octolane's SF office on a Sunday. About half an hour in, I decided to invest after learning about One's journey to the U.S. (Duke University dropout from a full ride program), talking about his ambition, and checking their demo." The Octolane story embodies Silicon Valley's original promise: two first-generation immigrant best friends who grew up with limited resources and taught themselves to code by watching YouTube videos. Now they're building AI technology sophisticated enough to challenge industry titans worth billions. It's the Silicon Valley dream distilled to its purest form - hard work and determination triumphing over entrenched power and privilege. Their round closed in just five days - and looking back, One Chowdhury admits they could have done it in 24 hours if they'd wanted to. He never needed to create a pitch deck because the round closed so fast. Product demos proved far more compelling than any slides could have been. The memory of receiving that YC acceptance call still brings a visible emotional response from One as he recounts it. It was an ordinary afternoon at Duke University in North Carolina when his phone lit up with a California number. "When Harj Taggar, Managing Partner at Y Combinator, called to tell me we got in, I completely short-circuited," One recalls, laughing at himself now but clearly still moved by the memory. The conversation itself became an unintentional comedy. "I actually had to ask Harj to repeat himself because my brain simply wouldn't process what he was saying. Harj probably wondered if he'd just accepted someone with serious hearing issues into YC." What made YC particularly transformative for One and Rafi was the sense of finally finding their tribe. "For the first time, I thought - wow, these are actually our people," One recalls. As the dust settles on Octolane's first funding announcement, the tech world watches with the same fascination reserved for high-stakes prizefights. In one corner stand the CRM giants - massive corporations with billions in revenue, hundreds of thousands of employees, and decades of market dominance. The tallest building in San Francisco is named Salesforce Tower, which dominates the skyline, a physical manifestation of their market position. In the other stands a scrappy team of engineers led by two best friends who learned to code on YouTube, working seven days a week from coffee shops across San Francisco. While traditional CRMs continue asking "Did you update your fields today?" like a nagging parent checking if you've done your homework, Octolane simply says, "Go help your customers. I've got this." And 5,000 companies waiting in line seem eager to hear exactly that.
Forbes
09-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Artisan Raises $25M To Replace Repetitive Work With AI Employees
"Stop Hiring Humans" billboard campaign Artisan, the YC-backed startup behind viral campaigns and AI-powered employees known as Artisans, today announced a $25 million Series A led by Glade Brook Capital, a $2 billion global growth equity firm with a portfolio that includes xAI, Perplexity, Stripe, Revolut, SpaceX, Airbnb, and Uber. The funding follows the breakout success of its 'Stop Hiring Humans' billboard campaign, which generated over 1 billion online impressions and introduced the world to Ava—the company's flagship AI BDR now hired by more than 250 organizations. Additional investors in the round include Y Combinator, Day One Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, Oliver Jung, Fellows Fund, and others. Founded in 2023 by Jaspar Carmichael-Jack and Samantha Stallings, Artisan is building the next paradigm of software: a sleek, unified platform powered by AI employees, Artisans. Its flagship Artisan, Ava, automates outbound sales, replacing repetitive prospecting work with a smarter, fully autonomous system. The company is focused on two core goals: - Advancing AI employees from human-assisted to fully autonomous, capable of managing complex workflows with minimal oversight. - Consolidating the fragmented SaaS landscape into one intuitive platform, starting with outbound sales. 'Let's be honest, most companies waste millions paying talented people to do repetitive work that AI can handle better.' said Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, the 23-year-old co-founder and CEO of Artisan. 'Having brilliant minds stuck prospecting, personalizing emails, and tracking deliverability is a waste of human potential.' Ava is powered by Artisan's proprietary AI infrastructure: a model-agnostic, multi-agent system that handles each stage of outbound—from targeting and researching to writing and sending. Her real-time context engine scrapes the web for buying signals such as leadership changes, job postings, and funding announcements to ensure outreach is perfectly timed. Enterprise fintech company SumUp is one of hundreds of customers using Ava to scale outreach. By leveraging Artisan's unique local business targeting, integrating data from Google Maps, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google Reviews, SumUp receives 8–15 positive responses per week from previously unreachable local SMBs. 'At SumUp, we prioritize efficient and scalable growth,' said Karlo Buik, Growth Lead at SumUp. 'Artisan's platform streamlines our outreach and gives us the insights we need to reach the right businesses in meaningful ways.' As part of its mission to create real value—not vanity metrics—Artisan is piloting a new success-based pricing model through a partnership with the platform founded by Manny Medina, co-founder and former CEO of Outreach. 'We don't want to charge customers unless we're actually creating outcomes,' said Carmichael-Jack. 'Our north star is impact. If Ava is generating real conversations, booked meetings, or pipeline—that's when we should get paid.' Unlike traditional tools, Artisan is pioneering intent-driven outbound with advanced capabilities that allow Ava to engage prospects at exactly the right moment: 'Outbound the way it's done today is going to stop working,' said Carmichael-Jack. 'We're building products that make AI more intent-driven and, ironically, more human—so humans can focus on the things they're uniquely great at.' To accelerate product development, Artisan has appointed Ming Li as Chief Technology Officer. Li previously served as VP of Technology at unicorn Deel, and has led engineering teams at Rippling, TikTok, and Google. He joins alongside four senior engineers from Rippling, significantly expanding Artisan's technical depth as it scales its platform and expands into new product categories. Following Ava's success, Artisan plans to launch two new AI employees by the end of 2025: Aaron, an Inbound SDR Artisan, and Aria, a Meeting Assistant Artisan. Both will operate within the Artisan Sales ecosystem. 'We're building the full go-to-market ecosystem,' said Jaspar. 'One platform with every core product across sales, marketing, and customer success–powered by Artisans doing the work AI does best, and seamless software enabling humans to do theirs. Moving chronologically down the sales cycle, we're taking on each legacy category-leading SaaS player one by one.' As AI continues to reshape the future of work, Artisan is betting that the next generation of enterprise software won't just support human workflows—it will replace them where it makes sense. By automating the most repetitive, time-consuming tasks with intelligent, autonomous AI employees, Artisan is redefining what productivity looks like for go-to-market teams.
