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Ryan Hoover

YC's latest Request for Startups

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YC published a list of themes they want to invest in:

  1. Full-stack AI Companies

  2. More Design Founders

  3. Voice AI

  4. AI for Scientific Advancement

  5. AI Personal Assistant

  6. Healthcare AI

  7. AI Personal Tutor for Everyone

  8. Software Tools To Make Robots

  9. The Future of Education

  10. AI Residential Security

  11. Internal Agent Builder

  12. AI Research Labs

  13. AI Voice Assistants for Email

  14. AI for Personal Finance

Of course there are many projects and startups that launched on Product Hunt in each of these categories.

Question for y'all: Which new products are you most bullish on that fit one of the themes above?

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Matt Carroll

I've been psyched on building for personal finance, so it would be interesting to see what comes up there!

I think voice as an input vector will continue to claw keyboard's market share! so bullish on voice in general.

Matt Carroll

reply to add: WRT personal finance, i think you probably don't need AI to give the average person good financial advice, though the chat interaction may make people feel more confident in the suggestions.

I would imagine commoditizing a lot of the hacks that ultra high net worth people use for managing their money and selling to "regular" high net worth people might be an interesting spike into personal finance where you could command a reasonable premium on a product. requires domain knowledge though around what the UHNW crowd does to optimize though. likely would need to leverage AI more, as it would be a more nuanced decision tree.

Mike Kerzhner

@catt_marroll My read on personal finance products is that most of them are habit building and budgeting apps. IMO, the biggest gap in the market is the following.

I want a checking account where all of my income lands. I want the checking account to be aware of my regular expenses, seasonal expenses, maybe even my calendar to account for birthday presents and travel. All excess income should be auto invested using a "dumb" etf strategy.

Or maybe there is already something out there that does this?

Matt Carroll

@mikekerzhner interesting. good suggestions. im not sure about this existing, probably in some capacity somewhere.

@plaid provides an API for recurring transactions on someones accounts, though im not sure how accurate it is with things like paychecks / investments. probably reasonable to spin something up with an LLM as well.

i think a nice middle ground would be an email that is like 'you have an excess 1,200$ based on these upcoming expenses and deposits'

I will enroll you to beta test when I get a chance to implement!

Mike Kerzhner
@catt_marroll the app can be called wwbt: what would Buffett do?
Mike Kerzhner

@catt_marroll another idea is a "smart" credit card. The credit card can distinguish between essential and non-essential purchases. If I am buying groceries, the transaction always succeeds. If I am buying a fancy latte and I am over budget for lattes this month, the transaction fails.

Matt Carroll

@mikekerzhner oh man that is so ruthless. i wonder if people would actually voluntarily sign up for that..

i guess people limit their screen time and have other people manage their access, so maybe it isn't that wild..

Mike Kerzhner

@catt_marroll ideally the app is as ruthless as I set it to be. But habit building is hard, in general.

Matt Carroll

@mikekerzhner there is something here for sure. ultimately most people interact with the financial world through CC's, so having that be the "budgeting" layer directly and not being second order is pretty compelling. i wonder if there is a saas that lets you just spin up issuance of credit cards.

steve beyatte

@catt_marroll I think AI for sure helps the average person here. Even back in the day, Mint would categorize everything and bark at me if I spent too much as defined by my budgets. AI would theoretically do a better job of building a reasonable budget based on my demographic and do a better job of flagging suggestions, savings, etc.

This is either huge or stupid but doing this for businesses would also be huge. So many subscriptions go to waste so having an AI audit recurring expenses and present potential savings could also be pretty amazing.

Matt Carroll

@steveb man you have a ton of good ideas! for businesses is feels interesting, and deff makes sense that if you loose a few employees, etc its easy to loose sight of things you are paying for.

Chris Messina
Top Hunter

@catt_marroll have you taken a look at @Fey ?

Matt Carroll

@chrismessina maybe i am mis understanding their offering but my goal with investing is to be as passive as possible. If i check on things less than once a month I consider that a success.

I do think their is a large addressable market of people who are much more active investors!

Tarikh Korula

Most interested in

  • AI Personal Tutor for Everyone

  • The Future of Education

  • AI for Personal Finance

  • More Design Founders

Maria-Cristina Muntean

Nice!! Interested in software tools to make robots... still waiting for my personal robot hahahah

Rajiv Ayyangar

Very bullish on voice as both input and an interface!

Voice input has been the biggest behavior change for me in the last few months - with @Aqua Voice / @Wispr Flow I type 50% less.

Plus the building blocks for voice AI are getting really good (e.g. RTC @Daily.co / open source orchestration @Pipecat / voice agent platform @Vapi / evals for voice agents @Coval)

I'm also super bullish on design founders, especially since the human-AI interface landscape is currently pretty primitive. I think we need to break out of the chat/autocomplete UX paradigm.

Also, personal finance and personal assistants are historically really fraught / borderline tarpit areas that I think have huge potential now. Excited for scheduling in particular (really hard problem I've worked on for a bit).

Navdeep

I am growing more and more bullish on building the right AI Personal Assistant. Current AI systems come nowhere close to understanding their users individually. Will try to launch something in this space for sure this year.

Denis Sigal

Will be watching you building@navdeep_rathore . I share this idea AI should become the perfect assistant, as they could get permanent access and feedback from user, nested inside your systems/OS.

Nika

For me, personally, it is learning languages (education + voice tutoring).

Appreciate they are open to supporting projects related to health, studying and science.

Mike Kerzhner

cc @kwindla, the expert in voice ai.