(Market Map) ConsumerTech Landscape: Y Combinator W23 Batch

Author

Kaushik Tiwari
March 19, 2023

Founder - Usman Gul
Apollo Group is a diversified technology group that builds consumer marketplaces in frontier markets. Their first consumer brand is called Pluto, a marketplace for consumers to hire trained blue-collar service providers.

Founder - Sunny Singh
Jaldi is an online supermarket for South Asians living in the US. They deliver thousands of South Asian grocery, beauty, and household products right to customers’ doors through nationwide and same-day local delivery.

Jaldi believes that consumption is more than just sustenance – it's a cultural experience. Their mission is to provide our customers with high-quality, fresh, and carefully sourced products that reflect the rich cultural diversity of South Asia. The next big wave in retail will be cultural commerce, how communities shop and interact with what they buy. Jaldi is leading the way in this emerging space.

Rishi Bhuta & Will Stith 
Decoherence makes it easy for anyone to create videos with AI in minutes rather than hours. We enable creators to generate music videos or B-rolls that match their content quickly.

Founders - Royce Branning & Oliver Hill
Clearspace helps users eliminate compulsive phone usage. The missing layer of the internet that aligns how you actually spend your time with your best intentions

Founders - Marcelo Canovas, Luis Felipe Franco, Ilana Nasser, Pedro Pedruzzi
Vendah helps women in LATAM make extra money by reselling kitchens and homeware to neighbors and friends. In 1.5 years, we've helped 16,000 resellers sell over 1,8M dollars of goods. In the last 6 months, we grew 3x reaching 300k monthly revenue in February with positive margins after marketing expenses.

Webcomic platforms like Webtoon draw $100M+ in MRR. Currently, comics (aka webtoons, manga) are created by drawing, which requires art skills and is labor intensive.
KURUKURU enables every storyteller to create comics by simply posing scenes and characters, adjusting facial expressions, and applying one-click stylized filters, supported by a massive 3D asset library, pose, and facial expression library. Regardless of their art/3D skills, creators can produce panels in minutes, not hours. All within clicks in a browser.
They generate revenue by creating subscriptions and selling comics to fans.
The founders are passionate former webcomics creators and domain experts in computer graphics and AI. ex-MIT Media Lab, Vimeo, Adobe, and investment banking.

Danial Hashemi, Keyan Kazemian & Arman Roshannai
222 is a full-stack social experiences platform to generate real-life experiences at curated hyperlocal venues where we can reliably predict you will like both the people & place.

Founders - Josh Mitchell & Eddie Raven
Say what you'll do, when you'll do it, and how much money you'll forfeit it. Send a photo or timelapse evidence of you completing the habit by the time you set, or we take your money.
For example, I could set it to go to the gym (or meditate for 30 mins, take a photo of a sent email, or of a max amount of calories on MyFitnessPal) tomorrow at 6 am, or lose $30. If I don't send photo evidence to the gym (that we manually approve), I lose $30.

Founders - Tomás Campos, Domingo García-Huidobro, Pedro Saratscheff
Ruuf offers no-money-down installations that generate free money for homeowners from day one. They are digitalizing the whole process of going solar. Instead of using traditional forms and leaving them up to customers to fill them, they use technology to take all that burden off our customers' plates. They only ask for an address and offer free instant quotes.

Pair is the first genuinely mobile-first education platform. We make learning as fun and engaging as watching a TikTok by enabling any creator to launch premium white-label mobile courses. As successful 7 figure course entrepreneurs ourselves, we have reimagined the course platform experience for the next generation of creators with best-in-class gamification tools and proprietary AI to maximize each student's learning.

Founders - Charles Forman, Joe Watkins
Storyboarder is a tool and a platform for anyone to create, share, and sell webcomics.
In East Asia, the webcomic (or digital manga) industry is an $11B market and rapidly growing in the rest of the world. Webtoon, the largest company in the space, generates $100M / month in revenue. However, their addressable market is limited by their content creators, who need to know how to draw. Readers are desperate for a greater variety of stories in webcomics.
Through years of working with filmmakers, storyboard has built extremely easy-to-use storyboarding software with 700K users. They democratize visual storytelling to everyone. They’re working on the next generation that, through advances in video game interfaces, ubiquitous 3D computing, and AI, will allow anyone to create scenes easily, pose characters, to create webcomics.

Founders - Leo Lu, Sam (Kaishan) Ding, Mark Ding
Chataverse is an NFT-gated messaging app that enables NFT holders and creators to communicate, socialize, and govern transparently and crypto-natively.

Founders - Manu Chopra, Sahil Chopra
Linum is Midjourney for video. Linum lets anyone turn an idea into a movie.