Participated · Seed · Apr 2025

Tella offers a screen-recording and video-creation platform aimed at entrepreneurs and educators to produce professional-grade demos, tutorials, and presentations with minimal effort. Its product features a custom-built video rendering engine that outputs high-quality videos instantly after recording, removing long editing and publishing bottlenecks. The company emphasizes ease-of-use compared with traditional, complex video-editing software and targets higher-impact use cases like marketing and product content. Tella already counts fast-growing customers such as Pleo and ChartHop and is used for internal and external product communications. As part of its next growth phase, Tella plans to expand its team and integrate AI capabilities for automatic editing, mistake removal, effect application, and branding. The startup plans to release an AI-powered editor later in 2025 to accelerate those capabilities. Financially, Tella recently secured new seed funding to support its product and go-to-market expansion.

Participated · Seed · Mar 2025

AvatarOS builds high-end, AI-powered 3D avatars and virtual influencers focused on personalized traits and lifelike movement. Founded by Isaac Bratzel after he left Dapper Labs in 2022, the company emphasizes premium, customized avatars rather than mass click-to-generate content. It is currently onboarding beta users and offering a simple API so clients can integrate avatars and power them with large language models. Today AvatarOS creates premium avatars for clients directly, and plans to provide more creation and adjustment tools to customers over time. The startup will use its seed funding to grow the team and build a machine learning-based deformer responsible for creating lifelike movements. The company is in an exploratory phase to find the right product-market fit.

Participated · Seed · Jan 2025

Final Round AI's flagship product, the Interview Copilot™, delivers real-time AI-generated answers and insights to support candidates during interviews. The company positions itself to guide job seekers through every step of the career journey, aiming to help users land roles in under 30 days. Final Round AI announced an $8 million scholarship program that refunds Pro Premium membership fees when members successfully land jobs using its tools. The company says it will use the new capital to enhance the Interview Copilot and other products, scale operations and expand its team, and pursue partnerships to unlock new revenue streams. The announcement cites broader market friction — noting it can take an average of 247 days and 294 applications to secure a role — as context for the product's mission to make transitions faster, smarter, and more equitable. Final Round AI is headquartered in San Francisco.

Participated · Seed · Oct 2024

Clerk Chat offers an AI-driven conversational messaging platform that enables teams to respond to client and customer requests in real time. The platform integrates with collaboration and CRM systems such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Webex, Salesforce, HubSpot and Global Relay. It supports connections with telecom providers including Verizon, Twilio, Bandwidth, Sinch and Infobip and is built to meet industry compliance standards. Led by CEO Alexander Haque and CTO Igor Boshoer, the company serves over 1,000 customers across financial services, healthcare, logistics and other industries. Clerk Chat plans to expand its AI messaging capabilities and deepen partnerships with telecom providers while continuing to hire key talent.

Participated · Seed · Oct 2024

Artisan builds AI sales agents (AI SDRs), with a flagship product called Ava that automates outbound email outreach. The company worked closely with model provider Anthropic to tighten prompts and reduce hallucinations, and says Ava now hallucinates roughly one in 10,000 emails. Artisan reports about 250 customers and $5 million in annual recurring revenue, employs 35 people, and is hiring roughly 22 more; it recently hired CTO Ming Li. The team acknowledges early product issues and customer churn but says it has largely improved quality and targeting. Artisan is developing two new agent products—Aaron for inbound messages and Aria as a meeting manager—scheduled to launch by the end of 2025. It is also piloting a success-based pricing option with Paid.ai and has shifted to heavier customer qualification to avoid poor-fit accounts. Artisan is an AI company that builds autonomous AI "employees" and a collaborative software ecosystem for streamlining outbound sales and related functions. Its core product is the Artisan Sales platform and the AI Sales Agent Ava, launched in February 2023 to automate up to 80% of a BDR’s responsibilities and consolidate multiple outbound tools into one. The company launched platform V2 in April with Level 2 autonomy—allowing agents to craft and send emails without human oversight—and says it is developing Level 3 and ultimately Level 5 autonomy. Artisan plans to add additional agents (Liam for marketing and James for customer success) and is focused on onboarding mid-market and enterprise clients. The startup has attracted hundreds of companies to its platform, grew its team from three to 13 employees since Y Combinator acceptance, and is preparing for a Series A. Financially, Artisan raised $7.3M in May 2024 and has now secured an $11.5M seed round to fund product development and go-to-market expansion. Artisan AI builds autonomous AI employees and a unified platform intended to replace an enterprise’s SaaS stack, enabling humans and AI to collaborate without context switching. The company is led by CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, CTO Dr. Rupert Dodkins, and CPO Samantha Stallings. In April the company launched V2 of its platform, introducing Level 2 autonomy for its Ava agents (an advancement from Level 1 released in February 2023), enabling agents to craft and send emails autonomously. Since joining Y Combinator Artisan has grown from 3 to 13 employees and has onboarded over 100 companies. The company raised a $7.3M Seed round and intends to use proceeds to expand operations and development efforts. No revenue figures or other financial metrics were disclosed in the article. Artisan AI is developing human-like digital workers, called Artisans, that automate end-to-end job workflows and join teams as additions rather than tools requiring constant human management. The company’s first Artisan, Ava, is a sales representative launching on December 4th and currently automates the full outbound sales cycle; she will soon be able to automate the entire sales cycle and act as a co-pilot to humans. Artisan plans to release five more Artisans next year. The startup was founded in 2023 by Jaspar Carmichael-Jack and Dr. Rupert Dodkins and is based in San Francisco, CA. It currently employs three full-time software engineers and plans to expand to a 30-person team within six months. The company will participate in Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch and is using its pre-seed funding to hire engineering and product talent.