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Y Combinator held its Summer 2022 Demo Day virtually last week. As always, the Wing team participated, and we congratulate all of the companies on their launch!
148 of 223 companies were B2B in the batch, according to Y Combinator’s tags. In this post, we filter for those focused on enterprise and developer markets in the U.S. and in Europe. Below are 1) notable quotes and b) key trends based on our review of the companies.
1) Notable Quotes
Throughout the two days, we took notes on presenters’ comments that are bold, insightful, or contrarian on enterprise and developer opportunities and challenges.
Notable quotes included:
Fintech is the key to unlock carbon accounting. - Bend
The biggest bottleneck in trucking operations is scheduling warehouse appointments and rescheduling them whenever there are delays. - BiggerPicture
As engineers, we noticed a recurring problem for each new crypto project. We had to rebuild the same scripts to monitor the blockchain for data and then insert it into apps. - Blockscope
Dealing with geospatial data cost us three months, and we realized that everyone lost the same amount of time. We replace that time with a few lines of code. - Bunting Labs
80% of interested buyers never make it to sales simply because there are too many steps in large organizations. - Caddie
More than half of all B2B sales opportunities start with a customer clicking on a "Contact Sales" button. - Caddie
Everyone knows that finance teams create reports for internal leaders every month. What you likely didn't know is that it can take medium size businesses over 90 hours per month and that most of the work is mind numbing. - Cashboard
Most product teams still use spreadsheets for planning because existing solutions like Jira and Asana are too rigid to brainstorm and evaluate options remotely. - Chordio
There are 32 million small businesses in the US, and most of them went online during the pandemic, leaving billions of breadcrumbs. - Ciro
Our Hacker News launch was #11 in YC launch history. - CodeCrafters
Apple's iOS killed third party tracking, and businesses now spend 40% more to acquire the same number of customers. - Conversion Pattern
Data consumers are the best judges of data quality, not the teams that produced the data, yet existing data quality tools are only built for data producers. - Deekard
Disability is #1 category of discrimination lawsuits, and there was a 61% increase in accomodation requests over the past year. - Disclo
Git is widely used by developers, but it's a pre-cloud tool created in 2005 that lacks the scalability and security needed today. - Diversion
60% of meters in the U.S. are not smart and still require a person driving out every month to read manually. - Evoly
Almost 100,000 companies worldwide hold crypto on their balance sheet today. - Excheqr
While leading a team at Centene, I realized that we were spending 80% of our time looking for data from different systems and teams. - Grai
Competing with Google is a long shot, but their generative AI efforts are bogged down by their business model and their fear of controversy and in-fighting, leaving the room for a competitor to emerge. - Hello
Less technical people are unable to convert their domain knowledge into reliable data pipelines. - ilumadata
The REC market opened in 2001 and the tech has not changed much since. It takes weeks to register and days to trade. - Jasmine
Our mission is to have every software company lead with their product, not the dreaded "Book a Demo" button. - Lancey
Games are the biggest use case for crypto today, accounting for 60% of DAUs. Today it takes games developers months to set up blockchain infrastructure. - Metafi
Every digital healthcare company is facing the same challenge - integrating critical systems with APIs that are poorly documented and constantly breaking. - Morf Health
Huge advances in language models in just the past year mean that we can now solve internal search, where there is only one right answer and no training data. - Needl
Renewable development is growing quickly, but only 1 in 5 solar wind projects in the US end up getting built because of due diligence issues. - Paces
We are the fifth fastest codebase in all of GitHub. - Payload CMS
Enterprises want to manage their own code but have to fall back on using Wordpress quite often, pointing to a huge gap in the CMS market. - Payload CMS
We noticed that a lot of people are starting to build websites with Notion, which is easier but lacks basic features of a website builder. - Popsy
Crypto lacks a sophisticated data platform to make sense of its market dynamics, so we're taking our learnings from ride sharing and applying to crypto. - Probably Nothing Labs
In the future every company will have an active Discord community to engage with their customers. - SolStar
Spreadsheets are the future of BI. - Tersho
There is an industry switch in auditors from billable hours to fixed fees, so efficiency is becoming imperative for the first time. - UpLink
2) Key Trends
The dramatic advancements in language models, even over the past year, enabled a series of “DALL-E for X” companies at Demo Day.
Design. Poly is DALL-E for design assets, creating stunning HD, professional-quality design assets in seconds with AI, starting with textures.
Customer service. Fini automates high volume customer service, providing proactive resolutions using large language models and data warehouse connectors. Typewise provides text prediction for customer service and sales.
Code. Maya Labs is a new way to build custom software in minutes from plain English natural language.
Search. Needl provides an internal search tool to instantly find any file, document, or message.
Web3 presents a new paradigm for enterprises and developers. Numerous startups at Demo Day addressed unsolved challenges in this shift.
Community. SolStar makes crypto easy on Discord, enabling users to buy and send crypto to friends and companies to monetize communities.
Custody. Derisk provides key custody software for businesses to secure crypto assets via multi-party computation cryptography.
Data. Blockscope is a Web3 data platform, fetching and inserting on-chain data into apps. Probably Nothing Labs, the Databricks for Web3, decodes and indexes any type of smart contract out of the box, across chains, and at scale.
Games. Metafi, the Unity for Web3 games, provides blockchain infrastructure for Web3 games.
Identity. Notebook Labs is an anonymous KYC and credit scoring protocol for Web3 identities using zero knowledge proofs to protect users' PII. Chainsight provides an API for Web3 background checks to detect crypto and NFT scams in real-time.
NFT. Mintplex provides no-code tools for launching NFT projects without the need for engineers.
Risk. Immuna provides a risk mitigation platform for crypto investors that detects and responds to suspicious on-chain network events without needing access to private keys.
Testing. Zoltar Labs provides fully-customizable, private test environments in the cloud for Web3 smart contracts.
Treasury. Excheqr provides a platform to manage crypto treasury across all major chains without gas fees.
Interactive demos were a new theme at Demo Day. Several startups provided no-code tools for sales and marketing teams to build product demos.
Products. Lancey provides an interactive demo builder platform for self-driving demos.
Sales. Manatee provides a no-code tool for sales reps to develop custom, interactive product demos without requiring developers time.
API companies. SideGuide helps API companies accelerate developer adoption with live code sandboxes.
In marketing, several startups addressed the new era of a cookieless Web.
Cookieless. Banabo, the Ramp for Marketing, provides cookieless multi-touch attribution based on a new privacy-first identification protocol for unique devices. Conversion Pattery provides a no-code customer data platform for the cookieless era.
Analytics. SilkChart provides a no-code analytics platform that tells marketing whether their ads are bringing high-value users.
SMS. Boostly in an SMS marketing system for restaurants.
In sales, several startups addressed challenges in sales prospecting, note taking, and coaching.
SMB prospecting. Ciro is a sales prospecting tool for companies that sell to SMBs and local businesses.
Sales funnel. Caddie provides "contact sales" flow for B2B websites that automatically qualifies, routes, and schedules sales meetings.
Notes. Pilot AI provides an AI assistant for salespeople that auto-fills sales CRM systems from sales calls.
Coach. Trellus is a real-time sales coach for SDRs, providing real-time AI guidance on what to say and how to say it.
Developer tools continue to be a dominant theme among Demo Day startups with a diverse range of innovations from an alternative to Git to a Co-Pilot for UI testing.
Code. Diversion is a scalable, cloud-native Git alternative, rebuilding code management entirely in the cloud. Windmill is an open source platform to turn scripts into production-grade internal apps and workflows. The company is the "sweet spot between no-code Retool and complex Temporal." Mito enables data analysts to write Python by editing a spreadsheet UI.
Collaboration. Instant, the modern Firebase, makes it easy to build real-time and collaborative apps like Notion and Figma with features such as multi-player, optimistic updates, and offline mode. Blitz is a no-code platform to build collaborative apps.
UI. Artemis Labs automatically creates Jupyter Notebook-style UIs from in-line comments, without requiring engineers to modify code or leave IDEs. Dev Tools AI is Co-Pilot for UI testing, helping developers automatically build and fix UI and browser tests.
Cloud. Pluralith provides automated cloud infrastructure compliance and documentation.
CMS. Payload CMS is a developer-first, headless enterprise CMS and application framework.
Dashboards. Vizzly provides embeddable dashboards for SaaS companies that users can customize.
Enterprise integrations. Kombo provides one unified API for enterprise software such as Workday, SAP, or NetSuite. Activepieces builds SaaS integrations with a flow builder and a Javascript SDK.
Feedback. Wolfia allows developers to get feedback on mobile apps by sharing links to interactive versions that run on browsers.
Geospatial. Bunting Labs provides no-code geospatial data pipelines.
Microservice. Nucleus is the modern backend platform for microservices in any cloud.
ML. Sematic is an open-source, end-to-end ML development platform.
Search. Hello is the search engine for software developers, using generative AI to return detailed explanations and code snippets rather than lists of links and to combine answers from multiple websites.
Serverless. Sunpia allows developers to deploy serverless apps without writing code.
Testing. DeploySentinel helps developers fix broken tests, capturing DOM, network, and console events from CIs.
Websites. Popsy is a no-code website builder that works like Notion and is less complicated than traditional website builders like Wix and Squarespace.
Several startups addressed unmet needs of product teams, who are now central in the tech movement of product led growth.
Product development. Monterey.ai, the Co-Pilot for product development, automatically generates detailed and actionable product specs, including feature ideas, metrics, designs, and launch plans.
Product planning. Chordio provides planning software for remote product development teams.
Code analysis. FlyCode provides code analysis to make Web apps editable by non-technical product teams without coding.
Climate change has implications and initiatives for enterprises, and startups at Demo Day provided new solutions to corporations, startups, and renewal project leaders.
RECs marketplace. Jasmine is a decentralized market for climate assets, reducing the time to register and trade RECs from weeks and hours to seconds.
Startups. Bend is 1-click carbon accounting API for startups, providing precise, real-time carbon gas emission estimates with Brex account or other spend data.
Commercial real estate. Cambio helps commercial real estate companies and tenants decarbonize buildings by measuring carbon footprints and recommending retrofits.
Renewable projects. Paces provides software for renewable developers to identify the best places for renewable projects based on a unique dataset of grid, permitting, environmental, and incentives data.
Fintech remains a major theme at Demo Day. Startups included both new financial services products for enterprise markets and new tools and platforms for finance, insurance, and real estate teams.
Risk. Coris provides risk API for fintechs that underwrite SMBs, which is "notoriously difficult" as credit data is sparse. Ballerine provides an open and self-serve user risk decisioning platform that is not bounded to specific geographies and company types.
Identity. AiPrise provides a global KYC platform to let fintech companies integrate with multiple identity vendors across over 100 countries. TrueBiz provides instant background checks for businesses, automating review of corporate documents such as articles of incorporation and combining with third-party data sources.
Auto insurance. Axle is the Plaid for insurance, starting with verification information for auto insurance.
Benefits. Pasito provides benefits decision support to save money on healthcare and payroll for companies and employees.
BNPL. Tranch is Buy Now Pay Later for B2B SaaS and services businesses.
Card on file. Sunlight is universal card-on-file API for apps and subscription services.
Collaboration. Cashboard helps finance teams collaborate with internal leaders, automating the building and sharing of reports.
Invoices. Invofox helps software companies automatically extracting data from invoices.
Payroll. Thera provides payroll that is fully compliant for remote workers in all 50 states.
Real estate. Ruffo facilitates cross-border real estate transactions, letting home buyers sign and notarize from their cellphones.
Subsidiaries. Blee is the Rippling for international subsidiaries, helping fast-growth companies launch and operate globally.
Underwriting. Ruleset enables lenders to set underwriting rules without writing code.
Usage based billing. Paigo makes it "extremely easy" for SaaS businesses to provide usage-based billing.
Verification. Two Dots provides automated income and employment verification, starting with rental applications for property management companies.
Workers comp. Stream provides automation for workers' comp claims management.
401k. Feather is a modern 401k provider for startups.
In addition to financial services, healthcare is one of the most significant areas of vertical innovation for Demo Day founders.
Data API. Morf Health is a data integration platform for digital healthcare. Metriport is the Plaid for healthcare data, helping digital health companies access and manage user health and medical data through an open source universal API. Medplum is an API-first, open source electronic health record that is high quality and programmable.
Data infrastructure. Lamin Labs provides data infrastructure for biology, doing for R&D data what Git and GitHub did for code.
Disability. Disclo provides a health disclosure and accommodation platform for companies.
Notes. Knowtex automatically creates visit notes with billing codes from doctor-patient conversations.
Remote monitoring. Malama Health enables remote monitoring for diabetes in pregnancy, which affects 1 in 5 women.
Other verticals for startups at Demo Day included construction, insurance repair, manufacturing, satellite, and utilities.
Construction. Provision is the Ironclad for construction, as contractors use CTRL+F to read documents, resulting in mistakes.
Fish processing. Shinkei provides robotics that automates the processing of highest grade fish.
Insurance repair. Albi is SaaS for insurance damage repair contractors to manage the entirety of their businesses.
Manufacturing. Cerrion automatically detects problems on factory production lines using computer vision.
Satellite. Quindar provides automated satellite operations for satellite owners to analyze, test, and operate satellites.
Utilities. Evoly provides smart electric and water meters as a service.
Data continues to be an important area of Demo Day innovation. New companies included the “Fivetran for real-time data,” “the Retool for data pipelines,” and the “Grammarly for Data.”
Data connectors. MovingLake, the Fivetran for real-time data, provides connectors with reliable, real-time, and replayable API data.
Metadata. Grai is open source version control for metadata, for example to understand how database changes will affect deployed machine learning models.
NLP. NuMind creates custom NLP models for data scientists, data analysts, and software engineers.
Data pipelines. ilumadata, the Retool for data pipelines, allows less technical users to edit data pipelines with easy-to-use tooling.
Data quality. Deekard, the Grammarly for Data, lets companies identify and resolve data quality issues by bringing data quality to the data consumers.
Several Demo Day startups focused on challenges across the supply chain.
Freight. LiveTrucks provides real-time visibility and alerting for freight.
Inventory. Autone's predictive analytics optimizes inventory management for brands, as it often takes 3 months from order to delivery.
Neobank. Tank Payments is a neobank for truckers. The company enables instant funding for trucking companies from factoring companies.
Scheduling. BiggerPicture provides scheduling optimization of pick-up and delivery times between trucks and warehouses.
Finally, there were startups in other functional areas, such as management, engineering, and human resources, and in other technology areas, such as autonomy, security, and semiconductors.
Access. Slauth.io provides access management platform to secure cloud infrastructure.
Autonomy. Polymath Robotics provides general autonomy for industrial vehicles.
BI. Tersho is a no-code BI dashboards tool that lives in spreadsheets.
Documents. UpLink provides document collection for accountants, auditors, and lawyers.
Education. CodeCrafters.io provides programming courses for experienced engineers.
Engineering. Intuned is an analytics tool for engineering managers to help manage their teams and work. Elessar provides performance tracking for engineers that developers love, creating timelines on progress and building digital portfolios of achievements.
HR. Juicebox is a subscription marketplace for vetted, independent tech talent without commissions. Taro is a premium membership for ambitious software engineers for insider advice on promotions, detailed data on compensation, and exclusive invitations to events.
News. Overwatch monitors news for large enterprises to detect and analyze risks to operations, supply chain, and reputation. Newscatcher provides a news API for enterprise risk, market research and data teams.
OKR. Peoplebox is an OKR and strategy execution platform that makes it easy for large companies to align teams and execute faster.
Pentesting. Oneleet, founded by an ethical hacker with 10+ years of experience, provides pentesting that combines AI and human expertise, starting with SOC2 compliance.
SaaS provisioning. AccessOwl, Okta for startups, automates SaaS account provisioning and permissioning for any tool.
Semiconductors. Integrated Reasoning provides fast processors for optimization problems such as routing delivery vehicles and packing shipping containers.
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Congratulations again to the entire YC S22 batch!
Reach out to us at @rajeevchand and @wing_vc with your questions and reactions.
