What AI Startups Will Change Our Life: YC W24 Batch Review
From music and movie generation to voice agents and fighting misinformation!
What a Great Year for (AI) Startups!
Demo Day from Y Combinator has always been a celebration of startups. But this year, it has become an AI celebration: more than half of the W24 cohort are now developing new models or AI products! So we went through them all, selected the most exciting, and now can't wait to discuss them.
Who knows, maybe we will find a new OpenAI? Or, on the contrary, we will conclude all of them are a waste of time. (no, this is for drama; there are a lot of cool companies out there!)
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Why Should We Keep an Eye Out for YC Batches?
Just to clarify, if you want to be the first to know about trends in the startup world, you have to keep an eye on what's going on inside Y Combinator. This incubator has extensive experience with startups. You may know Stripe, Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit, and Twitch among its alumni. And I'm sure YC won't slow down.
According to Garry Tan (President and CEO of YC), the 260 companies in the W24 cohort were selected from over 27,000 applications. The acceptance rate for startups was less than 1%! And AI was the biggest topic, with over 85 companies calling themselves "AI Startups" and over 180 mentioning machine learning in their demos.
I decided to explore the first group—those for which AI is a fundamental element.
Let's get to the bottom of this.
Eggnog | YouTube for AI-Generated Content
Eggnog.ai, founded by Jitesh Maiyuran and Sam Plank, calls itself "YouTube for AI-generated content." Its platform allows you to generate virtual characters, then animate them, and quickly create a full-fledged video. The product was launched just a week ago but is already racking up hundreds of thousands of views on Twitter.
Here's a fun example of what it offers:
Why it matters: If you've been a longtime reader of our newsletter, you know we often discuss virtual avatars, rapid content generation, and automation for creators. Many platforms (which you can read about here) already produce impressive results, but one major limitation is the lack of uniformity.
Creating a character that looked the same in all videos was very time-consuming. Even if you tried hard, it could have different features, face shapes, and other details. With Eggnog, this problem will be solved: digital avatars will become more lifelike and accessible. Isn't that great?
Nuanced | Detect Deepfakes and Misinformation with AI
From creating meme videos to something really serious: fighting misinformation. Nuanced Inc., an Ayman Nadeem and Dylan John Drover startup, promises to defeat "bad AI" (with "good AI"). The founders created a solution that automatically exposes fraud and deepfakes. Nuanced wants to help companies such as advertising platforms, news sites, and marketplaces distinguish human-generated and AI-generated content.
This way, Nuanced wants to keep the creators’ audience's trust. As the company says, no one wants to lose users to fake content and risk their reputation or customer churn.
Why it matters: Since this topic is more serious than the previous one, I'll allow myself to be more skeptical. The idea of Nuanced sounds very nice: fraudsters are modernizing their approaches, and we're getting better at following them. However, as someone who follows tech trends, I see the number and quality of fakes getting increasingly sophisticated.
Will Nuanced's AI keep up with the attackers? I'd say only time will tell.
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Soundry AI | Professional Quality AI Music Creation
In a previous weekly recap, we wrote that 2024 will be the year that AI will infiltrate music and video content production. Soundry.ai by Mark Buckler, Justin Parus, and Diandre Ruiz confirms this prediction.
The startup has created a new platform for musicians and sound artists. This solution enables the creation of songs based on AI samples and the incorporation of generated sound effects into movies and video games. The Soundry system is constantly and gradually learning to guess its users' preferences.
Why it matters: Two words: the democratization of the arts. Okay, it’s a few more. With solutions like Soundry, it will be easier to create our own music without fear of copyright infringement and generate more interesting content for everything from filming for family archives to Hollywood blockbusters.
Infinity AI | Type a Script, Get a Movie
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