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5 YC Startups to Watch & AI Pricing Explodes | Intent, 0018

Humans in the loop, power user pricing, and more!

December 07, 2024

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Five YC F24 Startups Worth Watching

Y Combinator's Fall 2024 batch just wrapped, and there's a clear theme emerging: startups that make AI actually work in the real world. Here are five that caught our eye (and why we think they matter):

HumanLayer
HumanLayer is basically "humans-as-a-service" for AI systems – their API lets AI agents ping actual people for feedback, input, and approvals. Think about it: as we race toward more autonomous AI, the ability to guarantee human oversight could be the key to faster, safer AI deployment. It's like having a responsible adult in the room while the AI does its thing. Humans-in-the-loop.

Canvas
Canvas is doing something sneaky-smart in the customer success space. Their AI copilot analyzes all those tiny signals in user behavior that humans might miss – like when a SaaS customer who used to use a feature daily now only touches it monthly. That's the kind of early warning system that could save millions in retained contracts.

Fix AI
Fix AI might have the most straightforward pitch of the bunch: "Find bugs before your users do." Their AI agents act like real users, clicking around your site to find problems – it’s a new flavor of automated QA. With teams getting smaller and AI making it possible for almost anyone to ship products, this kind of automated testing could be huge.

Gander
Gander is tackling the mess that is airline customer service. Instead of trying to rebuild decades of legacy systems (good luck with that), they're putting AI on top of existing infrastructure to handle disruptions and compensation claims. This is especially key in travel because even the simplest claim can involve customer auth, reconciling tickets across systems or even airlines, finding off-book accommodations… This could be the playbook for modernizing other complex industries – don't replace, augment.

Abundant
Abundant is kind of like HumanLayer, but for expertise in addition to oversight. When an AI agent is either stuck, needs specialized approval, or wants an industry expert’s context, it can seamlessly route in a human from Abundant’s network of relevant talent. When an AI agent is getting to 60-90% of a use case, a human-in-the-loop can bring it to 100% – today.

The thread running through all of these? They're not trying to build better AI models – they're building the infrastructure to make AI actually useful in the real world. Watch this space.

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The New Era of Consumer Pricing

OpenAI just dropped their new pricing alongside their latest reasoning model, o1 (and its companion, o1 pro mode). It's... interesting:

Plus ($20/month):

  • More messages, file uploads, and analysis

  • Advanced voice features

  • Limited o1 access

  • Beta feature testing

  • Custom GPT creation

Pro ($200/month):

  • Unlimited access to the good stuff: GPT-4o and o1

  • All the real-time voice features you can handle

  • o1 pro mode for the really hard problems

Here's our take: this is the future of AI product pricing, whether we like it or not. Running these models is getting more expensive, not less – between chain-of-thought reasoning and test-time compute, we’re adding more GPUs and more runtime to every query.

But users are becoming dependent and want unlimited access to these tools they now rely on. We've seen people on X begging to pay $500/month for unlimited Claude access (looking at you, rate limits).

In this era of tech, we’re going to see higher pricing tiers and caps for consumer products than ever before, but it’s often to the benefit of power users who want to “super engage.” It’s about playing a different game – aligning the product's capabilities with the level of investment power users are willing to make, maxing out the upside for both parties.

If you’re an AI product builder in this era, you might want to reframe how you think about pricing and usage. Is your product 10x better when it’s unfettered and unlimited, in a way that might make your users willing to pay 10x more to access it?

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