7 AI startups that stood out in YC’s Summer ’22 batch Posted on : Sep 12 - 2022

It’s that time of year again. This morning, Y Combinator (YC) hosted a demo day for its 2022 Summer Cohort — the 35th demo day in the incubator’s history. Featuring founders from 30 countries and startups across sectors including developer tools, fintech and healthcare, the day saw no shortage of compelling pitches.

The competition was fiercer than usual, owing to YC’s decision in early August to cut the batch size by 40% to around 250 companies in light of economic headwinds. But a particular category of startup stood out: those applying AI and machine learning to solve problems, especially for business-to-business clients.

This year had only 14 such startups compared to 20 last year, which makes sense as the overall cohort is also smaller. But the batches share a unifying theme: sales. Their products largely target hurdles in sales and marketing at a time when businesses are up against recessionary pressures.

Economic challenges aside, the large addressable market makes sales an attractive problem for startups to tackle. Grand View Research pegged the sales force automation software market alone at $7.29 billion in 2019.

Pilot AI

Pilot AI is developing a tool for sales reps that automatically translates call recordings into structured data that then directly updates a customer relationship management (CRM) system. The idea is to save reps time, and to assure their managers that the pipeline data is up to date.

It’s worth noting that other platforms like Fireflies.ai and Microsoft’s Viva Sales also do this. But Pilot AI founder Max Lu, previously a software engineer at Salesforce, says his product is more thorough than most, and can generate a summary of each call as well as data points that map to CRM fields and questions asked by reps, in addition to key parts of the recipient’s answer.

Typewise

Typewise is also in the sales space, but it focuses on text prediction across web apps via a browser extension and server-side API. Initially developed as a smartphone app, Typewise — which claims to have Fortune 500 customers in the e-commerce and logistics industries — can autocomplete sentences, insert smart snippets, automatically reply to messages and check for style and grammar consistency.

It sounds a little like TextExpander and Magical. But founder David Eberle says that Typewise is compatible with any CRM system and can be customized to a company’s data, with an analytics component that suggests which words and phrases to use.

YC Summer 2022 AI startups that didn’t fall within the sales and marketing tech category tended to focus on dev tools, another lucrative avenue to growth. Considering that 55% of developers struggle to find the time to build internal apps in the first place, according to one recent survey, VCs certainly see an opportunity: they invested $37 billion last year into startups creating dev tools. View more