Dozens of startups in Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 cohort do something that could be described as artificial intelligence. Though the term has lost much of its meaning, it’s still an important part of the tech landscape, and both using it and enabling it are fertile ground for new companies. Here are 14 notable startups from the latest batch.
Founded: 2022 in San Francisco, CA
By: Jay Chia, Sammy Sidhu
Building: A turnkey data warehouse for images and video. Eventual ingests, organizes and processes imaging data all on one platform. Also handles queries, simple integration with cloud providers and smart scheduling to save costs on compute.
Quote: “Currently users jerry-rig one together with multiple vendors or hard to manage open-source frameworks. We are a one-stop shop.”
TC Quick Take™: Many companies require some kind of image analysis pipeline and making a one-stop shop is a valid approach to the market. Keeping customers that start to scale and squint at the costs could be a challenge, though.
Founded: 2019 in Paris, France
By: Julien Cottineau, David Delbourgo
Building: An AI-powered platform for discovery and design of genomic therapies. Data science and databasing for “scientific, technical, biological, genomic, and experimental” data sets. Plus suggestions for experimental design and workflows.
Quote: “We help our customers develop more genomic medicines, faster, in leaner ways and make those revolutionary drugs more accessible to patients in need.”
TC Quick Take™: AI drug discovery is hot, but few have created serious value. Still, it’s obviously promising and specializing in genomic therapy is a good idea. How they’ll do the woollier workflow and design stuff I don’t know.
Founded: 2021 in Mannheim, Germany
By: Alex Conway, Sascha Lang
Building: An OS for production lines that records, digitizes and monitors factories with lots of workers. Includes real-time alerts, automated reports and photo-based quality control.
Image Credits: AiSupervision
Quote: “We automate what the best supervisors would do if they watched everything that’s happening inside your factory.”
TC Quick Take™: If it’s anything like what Amazon is already doing, it’s a short ride to hell for the workers. But if they can make this humane and helpful, many factories would consider it as a way to integrate multiple tracking tools.
Image Credits: Powerhouse AI
Founded: 2021 in Singapore
By: Kushal Pillay and Ivo Verhaegh
Building: An automated inventory solution for warehouses. Lots of worker hours are used up doing this thankless task, so why not automate it? Powerhouse uses ordinary phones that count inventory using regular pictures taken by staff. It’s part of a broader effort to make warehouses smarter and more efficient.
Quote: “They just take a picture with their phone, and our software counts the boxes.”
TC Quick Take™: I thought I heard the presenter say 97% accuracy, but the site says 99%. I don’t do inventory these days but hopefully it can be trusted enough that it doesn’t require hand recounting.
Founded: 2021 in Sydney, Australia
By: Ben Sand
Building: An ML training platform that focuses on ultra-high-performance and efficiency. By performing optimizations “around” a model (like pre-computing values, identifying bottlenecks and so on) they claim to be able to improve training times by orders of magnitude.
Quote: “The future of Cloud Computing, priced by performance not consumption.”
TC Quick Take™: Frederic looked into it a few weeks ago, and it seems like a nice upscale competitor that plays nicely with existing solutions.
Founded: 2021 in New York
By: Gaurav Bhar
