The investor’s latest “Camp” incubator trained up and funded 9 AI agent startups they hope will take on today’s more tedious tasks.
The use cases for many of these companies sound promising, but AI tends to have trouble keeping its promises.
But are AI agents at that stage?
And it’s well within the capabilities of today’s AI agents, which would primarily be tasked with understanding natural language rather than forms.
A framework for web-based AI agents with a pay-as-you-go model so if your company’s experiment craters, you only owe a few bucks.
The cross-border payments market is forecasted to reach over $250 trillion by 2027, according to the Bank of England.
So it’s no surprise that one of the trends among Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch of nearly 30 fintech startups is how to more easily move money globally.
Users get a U.S. bank account and access to low-cost local payment rails.
InfinityWhat it does: Cross-border banking for small businesses in IndiaWe heard from a lot of childhood friends during the past two days, so it was refreshing to see two siblings form a company.
Businesses in India account for $700 billion in cross-border trades per year, and Infinity makes 1% from those transactions.
Scores of accelerator programs run every year with the aim of identifying and cultivating founders in the earliest stages of building a company.
Only a fraction seek out founders who are explicitly aligned with some set of values — let alone classically conservative values like family, patriotism and faith.
Discipulus Ventures, which kicked off its first 10-person cohort yesterday, is a singular exception.
“You can’t say what matters, you can’t say what you think is true, and that’s obviously not going to be good if you want to solve these problems,” he said.
The city’s reputation has grown in recent months as a breeding ground for a new type of hard tech founder, one very much like the type Discipulus is trying to attract.
Until recently, many startups have prioritized growth at all costs, using abundant venture capital to acquire users and dominate markets without regard for profitability or sustainability.
However, recent market conditions have shifted toward “efficient growth,” balancing growth with profitability to create a sustainable path to scale.
The churn rate is not stable enough to accurately forecast customer lifetime.
With a product improving over time by adding features that address customers’ needs, we would expect the churn rate to decline.
Despite an improvement in a product, there are external factors beyond a company’s control, such as macro headwinds, that may encourage a higher churn rate.
Palace intrigue might be dominating the news cycle around OpenAI, but the AI startup — and its accelerator programs — are chugging along uninterrupted, so the PR team tells me.
OpenAI today announced the launch of Converge-2, the second cohort of its six-week Converge program for “exceptional engineers, designers, researchers, and product builders using AI to reimagine the world,” as the company describes it in a blog post published this morning.
As with members of OpenAI’s first Converge cohort, the 10-15 startups chosen to participate in Converge-2 will receive a $1 million equity investment from the OpenAI Startup Fund, the $100 million-plus entrepreneurial tranche announced last May backed by Microsoft and other OpenAI partners.
Do the math, and that’s at least a $10 million investment in the Converge-2 program — not an insubstantial chunk of change.
OpenAI is encouraging founders from all backgrounds, disciplines and experience levels to apply, including those based outside of the U.S.
