The Most Interesting YC W23 Companies
An overview of the YC W23 companies that I'm most excited about.
Companies I’m Watching:
Common Paper – build, negotiate, and sign contracts in minutes. They create standard, open-source commercial contracts including NDAs, DPAs and sales agreements (like YC’s SAFE but between customers and vendors). They also offer a contract management platform, stating that 63% of contracts close within 24hrs on their platform. I’m particularly interested in Common Paper because they are streamlining a fragmented process (the sales cycle) and creating a simple solution to an unnecessarily complex and confusing experience caused by contract negotiations. It’ll be interesting to see how they grow their contract management platform, and how the standard contracts they have developed will help drive growth.
inBuild – customizable workflows that streamline complex financial needs to eliminate tedious data entry for the accounts payable process. They employ AI to identify all invoices from incoming emails, extract the key data, route it to the appropriate team members, process payments, and reconcile expenses with the project budgets. If inBuild is able to work accurately, with minimal manual oversight, this has the potential to reduce 95% of data entry, saving countless hours for contractors.
Quazel AI – a language learner chatbot app that teaches people conversational fluency in a foreign language. Essentially, users can talk to an LLM-based AI and create different conversational scenes (like at a bakery in France) to learn a new language. If done right, I think Quazel AI has great potential, especially because cultural immersion is so critical to gaining conversational fluency, and Quazel AI could enable that.
Alaan – a multi-currency spend management platform to manage all company spend through corporate cards and automated invoice payments for Middle Eastern businesses. Though early, the highly regulated banking infrastructure in the Middle East leads to a frustrating expense and invoice management system, and Alaan is well-positioned to solve this.
Quantbase – a simple way to turn your investment research/data into a strategy for your audience to invest in. They are an SEC-registered asset manager and work with emerging managers, market analysis firms, and content creators in the retail investment space to turn their investment philosophy into a fund for their audience. The niche of content creators that want to automate their investing strategies to their audience definitely exists, and these creators typically face significant hurdles around setup and maintenance. This makes it impossible to run an investment strategy profitably at scale unless they can raise between $50-100M. Quantbase is trying to change that. It’ll be interesting to watch how they scale and grow user trust in the next year.
1stCollab – LinkedIn for creators and brands. Building in social is tough, but this is a really promising idea. Brands and businesses spend millions on influencer marketing, but finding the right influencers can be tough. Conversely, finding the right opportunities to pursue for influencers can be difficult, especially when there aren’t central postings. 1stCollab solves all of these painpoints and the team is great, which makes them a strong watch.
GoodCourse – the TikTok style micro-learning platform built for today's teams. GoodCourse lets companies provide training in a quick, engaging manner through micro-courses. The biggest question surrounding GoodCourse is whether it’s a need-to-have vs a nice-to-have, but only time will tell.
EzDubs – an AI dubbing platform for livestreams and publishing platforms. It’s a no brainer that broadcasting content in multiple different languages increases viewership → increases revenue. Right now, the platform lets you upload videos and generates the content with AI dubbing for you. This would be an interesting tool to have as a Google add-on, where you can toggle it on and it will AI dub the audio in real-time.
Numeral – e-commerce sales tax on autopilot. Numeral automates all aspect of sales from registration to remittance, and classify themselves as the single destination for sales tax. Navigating tax is always a mundane, complex process – a small brand doing $5M in sales typically owes tax in 30+ states across the U.S. If Numeral is able to streamline this process, they are able to solve a real pain point in e-commerce.