YC Request for Startups: Summer 2024
YC RFSThe Y Combinator Request for Startups, from Summer 2024: 16 ideas YC’s partners want founders to build. Each links to a problem page with more detail, related problems and people working on it.
A Way to End Cancer
Most cancers are treatable if caught early, and modern MRIs can spot millimeter-sized masses. YC wants companies that scale MRI screening at least 100x.
LLMs for Manual Back Office Processes in Legacy Enterprises
Legacy enterprises still run many repetitive back office processes by hand. YC wants startups using LLMs to automate work like invoices, contracts and customer service requests.
Developer Tools Inspired by Existing Internal Tools
Successful companies often build internal tools for their own painful, repetitive problems. YC suggests turning those into products for everyone else.
Stablecoin Finance
YC sees stablecoins as a big part of the future of money, citing fast, cheap settlement and early moves by PayPal and banks. It wants products, tools and protocols built on them.
Small Fine-tuned Models as an Alternative to Giant Generic Ones
Giant models are costly and raise latency and privacy problems. YC wants smaller fine-tuned models, and tools to build them, that match results at a fraction of the cost.
Explainable AI
Where trust matters, as in medical diagnosis, people need to understand why a model answers as it does. YC wants interpretable models and tools that explain existing ones.
Commercial Open Source Companies
YC argues open source companies move faster, win developer adoption and reach enterprise buyers sooner. It wants more of them, especially from very technical founders.
New Enterprise Resource Planning Software
ERP software runs businesses but is expensive, painful to implement and disliked by users. YC wants new business software that customers actually love.
AI to Build Enterprise Software
Enterprise software gets bloated trying to please every customer. YC wants AI that starts from a simple product and customizes it for each company.
Spatial Computing
YC believes spatial computing, covering AR, VR and mixed reality, will be the next major platform after mobile. It wants apps, developer tools and infrastructure for it.
New Defense Technology
YC argues traditional US defense contractors have grown slow under cost-plus contracts, and that startups selling to the DoD can do far better, as SpaceX did in launch.
Applying Machine Learning to Robotics
YC thinks robotics is close to its GPT moment as foundation models give robots human-level perception and judgment. It wants robots, and tools to build them, with B2B uses first.
Eliminating Middlemen in Healthcare
The US spends more per person on healthcare than other developed nations without better outcomes, and YC says much of it goes to middlemen. It wants startups that cut them out.
The Managed Service Organization Model for Healthcare
As private equity buys up clinics, YC backs an alternative: managed service organizations that give independent doctors back-office software and send them patients.
Foundation Models for Biological Systems
Most scientific work fails at the bench or in clinical trials. YC wants highly technical founders building foundation models for biology and medicine from scratch.
Using Machine Learning to Simulate the Physical World
Weather forecasting, fluid dynamics and drug discovery tools run heavy physics simulations. YC wants ML models that predict the same results in minutes on smaller computers.