Own Your Intelligence

With open-weight models now competitive, more companies will want to own and improve their own models instead of renting a frontier lab's. YC wants the tools and services that make that practical.

Most companies building with AI rent their intelligence from frontier labs. That made sense when the best models were years ahead, but YC notes open-weight models are now competitive on meaningful benchmarks, and companies have become more aware of their dependence on rented models, especially in regulated industries with strict data governance.

The gap: turning workflows into evals, expertise into training data and production failures into improvements, then carrying all of it forward to each new base model.

The ask: help companies own specialized models that capture how they operate and improve as the business learns.

Read the full request on YC →