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Are there any examples if successful exits or AI companies making it into the black yet? In general, not just YC
by iancmceachern 3y ago
Are there any examples if successful exits or AI companies making it into the black yet?
In general, not just YC
- jyu 3y agoMosaicML sold to DataBricks for $1.3B a few months ago. Probably sold too early.
- umeshunni 3y agoIs DataBricks in the black?
- iancmceachern 3y agoWhy is this being down voted? It's not meant as a negative question, but honest curiosity. It's been on my mind since watching a vintage episode of "Computer Chronicles" recently on the coming AI boom, in the 80s. I'm not aware of any of those companies being still around, so I could not help but wonder what's different now. Here is the episode: https://youtu.be/_S3m0V_ZF_Q?si=2XrE4nnw1hB4X1xy https://youtu.be/_S3m0V_ZF_Q?si=2XrE4nnw1hB4X1xy Real talk, to he fair, I've helped architect, design and bring to market several successful "AI" products in the medical space. There are good, useful, value add applications for the tech out there. But also, to be fair, I've always seen companies that don't call themselves AI companies be successful. For example, a surgical robotics company that calls itself a surgical robotics company, that uses some AI to enable certain value add features, I've seen success there. A company that calls itself an "AI company" that does robotic surgery, I've not seen those types of companies be successful.
- ramraj07 3y agoYou have to split this question pre ChatGPT and post. Obviously on post we have no data yet.
- iancmceachern 3y agoThank you. Ok, so pre. What's the list?
- kozikow 3y agoI feel that really there are no more place for "AI startup" as there is for "database startup" - there are some exceptions, but it's hard to compete with open source and large corporations treating AI tech as loss leader. Of course there are exceptions. I work on AI startup that with squinted eyes could be described "AI for pricing the insurance policy". As the company grows, we really add a lot of more non-AI pieces. A lot more goes into the frontend that keeps getting non-AI features. In a closed industry you can't get clean dataset for everything, so lots of heuristics and domain knowledge goes into some pieces of equation. Custom APIs and integrations for customers, etc. My point is, any "AI startup" by the time of exit won't be AI startup, but "problem X startup", where AI was initially used to address X. It will have a lot more non-AI pieces than AI. Rare exceptions of AI base technology will get commoditized pretty soon anyway.
- fatnoah 3y ago> I work on AI startup that with squinted eyes could be described "AI for pricing the insurance policy". I work in a very similar domain, and my company is also in the business of "solving problem x" with AI as the means to do so. It's in an area where effectiveness in solving the problem can be clearly measured, so it's easy to calculate ROI for customers. The main downside of the AI hype, IMHO, is the conflation with LLMs and the AI bubble. We do plan to leverage LLMs in some specific ways, but it's not the core of our business, just part of the solution.
- daveed 3y agoGoogle?
- iancmceachern 3y agoDid they call themselves an "AI" company when they were raising funds?
- frob 3y agoWit.ai. YC Winter 2014. Natural language tools for developers. Acquired by Facebook in 2015. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/wit-ai https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/wit-ai
- iancmceachern 3y agoDid Facebook roll this into their internal Devopps stuff? Is it available as a product or service from them?
- collaborative 3y agoMine. Only because my time is free and I already had the hardware