The second half of Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 cohort debuted on Thursday, once again bringing dozens and dozens of new startups before a portion of the venture capital community. As we did on Wednesday, several of the TechCrunch crew watched the entire series of presentations, picking a handful of favorites to highlight.
Enjoy our favorites from the second round of Y Combintor screenings while we go out and buy a few more cups of coffee. To work!
TechCrunch staff favorites
Atopile
- What is he doing: It allows electrical engineers to design circuit boards using code
- Why it’s a favorite: A lot of electrical engineering work on circuit boards is done through GUIs. Who knew? Not this author, which is why Atopile immediately piqued my interest. The startup, co-founded by Matt Wildoer, Timothée Peter, and Narayan Powderly, aims to bring design reuse, version control, and automation to hardware design—aspects the trio claims are sorely lacking in existing design tools. Instead of forcing electrical engineers to draw schematics by hand and validate every small change on test benches, Atopile captures a product’s requirements using a custom programming language and, from there, creates and validates the necessary build files. Nifty.
- Who chose: Kyle
Scritch
- What is he doing: A platform for vets to run their practices
- Why it’s a favorite: So, platforms for running veterinary businesses are not new, as I discovered after a cursory Google search (or a few). BUT, Scritch’s co-founders – Claire Lee and Rachel Lee – say what makes theirs different is its heavy reliance on automation. Scritch handles scheduling, billing and clinical workflows, as well as inventory management and care coordination. Additionally, the platform supports vet clients by submitting insurance claims on their behalf – which sounds like a very attractive feature for this aspiring pet owner.
- Who chose: Kyle
Lamp
- What is he doing: Postgres vector search tool
- Why it’s a favorite: If you cover the AI world at all, you’ve heard of vectors. There are companies like Semi that have increased many chapters for their own open source vector database software, for example. Lantern sells a hosted Postgres vector database on its own Lantern Cloud. His pitch: their product is cheaper than a similar offering from AWS. Continuing my hunt for startups that can make big bucks from the AI boom, I’m adding Lantern to the list.
- Who chose it: Alex
Example
- What is he doing: AI agents for task automation
- Why it’s a favorite: There has been a lot of talk about using artificial intelligence to replace workers who perform repetitive tasks. More interesting in the short term are AI tools that help workers themselves do more, faster. This is what Paradigm builds for the marketing and sales market use cases, with a human-in-the-loop perspective. I’ve spent enough time with business development reps and account executives to know that the market for this technology can be huge.
- Who chose it: Alex
Just words
- What is he doing: GenAI to help companies write better
- Why it’s a favorite: When Just Words founder Neha Mittal was working on Twitter and Pinterest, she discovered that small word changes in communications with users had a big impact on engagement rates. This follows what I have learned to write online. The startup’s plan to give a similar kind of push to customers may prove popular. I chose it as a favorite because it perfectly fits a theme I’ve noticed since the rise of ChatGPT and similar services: people hate typing. They don’t want to do it! So tools that help people not write are going to be big.
- Who chose it: Alex
Pythagoras
- What is he doing: Builds apps and improves them from text prompts
- Why it’s a favorite: I like two things about it. First, it has $47,000 worth of monthly recurring revenue – $564,000 ARR – from 140 customers in less than a quarter. That’s a lot, fast. And secondly because of the way it describes an interactive approach to app development where you answer questions and then it codes what you have in mind. I’m downloading Visual Studio to try it out, but the idea itself is very appealing to me, someone who hasn’t really written code since high school. (Later in the day, Marmalism shared a related suggestion that I would be remiss not to include here.)
- Who chose it: Alex
CommodityAI
- What is he doing: AI powered mission management for commodity trading
- Why it’s a favorite: Trading goods involves cross-border communication, strict adherence to import laws and a lot of red tape. CommodityAI’s mission — to bring all the invoicing and paperwork involved in commodity trading online and add a layer of collaboration on top of that — makes a lot of sense. This seems like a big improvement over parties having to call each other in other countries to double-check numbers and data on paper documents — if they can find them.
- Who chose: Becca
Copy
- What is he doing: It partners with clothing retailers to allow shoppers to try on clothes virtually
- Why it’s a favorite: I don’t like buying clothes online because it’s hard to predict how the items will look on my body and sending packages back is a pain. Kopia wants to help consumers visualize how clothes will fit by wearing an avatar that mimics the person’s body type. Other startups have tried the idea of a virtual placement space, but I have yet to see these tools available on shopping sites. Will Kopia’s product pique the interest of retailers? Hard to say, but I hope they or some other company figures it out because I definitely need a wardrobe update.
- Who chose: Marina
Weather care
- What is he doing: More accurate weather data using low-cost flat satellites
- Why it’s a favorite: Getting the weather forecast right is incredibly important because severe weather can affect people, structures and supply chains. I really like that this company is not only trying to make weather forecasts more accurate, but that they are doing it by making less expensive satellites. The company says its technology is 17 times more accurate at predicting weather than existing systems—a strong statement. Even if it’s not as accurate as the startup claims, I’m a fan of anything that will better help me predict when my building’s basement will flood.
- Who chose: Becca
Miden
- What is he doing: infrastructure for card issuer processing and core business banking in Sub-Saharan Africa
- Why it’s a favorite: Technology for Sub-Saharan Africa is not something you often hear about in the startup country. Technology for B2B companies located in this area is even less common. Building fintech infrastructure so companies can issue cards or even just report spending seems like a smart foundation for the company to acquire customers and then expand into other fintech products. The technology Miden builds is clearly in demand: The startup said it’s already profitable and has strong traction so far.
- Who chose: Becca
Oma Care
- What is he doing: It helps pay family caregivers.
- Why it’s a favorite: The caregiving market is growing, and there’s a huge opportunity – and demand – to make such a daunting experience flow a little easier. I liked this app because there have been studies that show that caregiving duties fall most often on women, as they are more than twice as likely to care as compared to men. Most of the time, they are not paid for it, adding to the statistics that the unpaid work of women worldwide is worth over $10 trillion. I welcome anything that tries to address this issue and am excited to see more innovation in this space.
- Who chose it: Dom
Garage
- What is he doing: Buy used firefighting equipment
- Why it’s a favorite: This is such a neat idea! A firefighter’s equipment is a a few thousand dollars, so creating a way for these departments to get gear without spending a lot of money seems smart. This is especially true considering that you wouldn’t want budget concerns to prevent firefighters from getting their firefighters the safest gear. Sometimes good ideas for technology aren’t complicated.
- Who chose: Becca
PointOne
- What is he doing: Al-powered time tracking and invoicing for lawyers
- Because it’s a favorite: PointOne co-founder Adrian Parlow, who was previously a lawyer at Fenwick & West, says one of the worst parts of being a lawyer is having to track time in six-minute increments. I’m not a lawyer or an attorney, but I imagine figuring out how many fractions of an hour went to each client is tedious and time consuming. PointOne claims that advances in artificial intelligence can automate timesheet creation by recording work done on lawyers’ laptops and computers. I’m a big fan of all apps that reduce the busy work of professionals. Now can anyone figure this out about deposit fees?
- Who chose: Marina
