Co-Founder & CEO · Woz (YC W25)
Ben
Ben
Collins
He doesn't want AI to improvise your software. He wants it to build it - on a line, inspected by humans, ready to ship. Welcome to the App Factory.
He doesn't want AI to improvise your software. He wants it to build it - on a line, inspected by humans, ready to ship. Welcome to the App Factory.
Most AI coding tools hand you a blank box and a prompt, then cross their fingers. Ben Collins built the opposite. At Woz, an idea written in plain English moves down an assembly line - each station staffed by a specialized AI agent, each weld checked by a human engineer before anything reaches a customer. He calls the messy alternative "vibe coding," and he built his company expressly to be the cure.
The promise is deceptively simple: describe the app you want, and get back something a real business can run on - deployed, hosted, published to the app store, and maintained. No development team to hire. No half-finished demo that falls over the moment a stranger taps it. The unglamorous parts - infrastructure, review, security, upkeep - are the whole point.
Collins is an MIT-trained engineer who spent years on the venture side of the table before crossing over to build. That dual fluency - the engineer who can read the code and the operator who can read the market - shows up in how Woz is framed. It isn't sold as magic. It's sold as a manufacturing process.
Just as the physical factory powered the industrial revolution, Woz unlocks the next great leap in how the world builds.- Ben Collins, on the "AI App Factory"
Role: Co-founder & CEO, Woz
Batch: Y Combinator, Winter 2025
Base: San Francisco
Trained: MIT engineer
Before: venture capital & partnerships
Co-founder: Brad Eckert (CTO)
Where rivals let one model freestyle an entire app, Woz breaks the job into discrete steps. Specialized agents handle each task like workers at their stations - and a human engineer inspects the output before it ships. Clean, structured, human-readable, secure. That's the spec.
Woz began the way a lot of durable things do - with a friendship that predates the company by more than a decade. Collins and his co-founder Brad Eckert first met as engineering students at MIT. Thirteen years on, they reunited to build the thing.
Eckert runs the technical side as CTO: an MIT EECS graduate with an AI master's background, more than 25 patents to his name, and a stint leading engineering at Cairns Health (YC S17). Collins brings the other half - the go-to-market lens earned across years in venture capital and partnerships, with roles tied to firms and startups including Rhapsody Venture Partners, NODAR, Safi-Tech and 310.ai.
It's a clean division of labor. One co-founder has spent his career deciding which companies are worth building. The other has spent his collecting patents. Put them on the same problem and you get a platform that takes both the engineering and the market seriously.
Alongside the consumer-facing app platform, Woz ships a tool for the people already in the trenches: WOZCODE, a plugin for Claude Code. The trick is unglamorous and very Collins - collapse a pile of redundant tool calls into a handful of efficient ones. A file edit that took nine-plus calls drops to two.
The payoff is a smaller bill and a faster loop. Reported savings run 25-55% on token cost, with coding tasks 30-40% quicker. It plugs into the Claude subscription a team already pays for. No magic - just less waste.
Led the $6M seed in October 2025.
W25 batch - and a returning investor.
Burst Capital, Untapped Ventures, MGV.
Co-owners of the NBA's Golden State Warriors.
"Today, we're building mobile apps. Tomorrow it will be web apps, TV apps, IoT software, and AR/VR - as well as specialized software for regulated sectors like healthcare and insurance."
- BEN COLLINS
The name nods to the engineer-builder spirit - and pulls double duty: WithWoz the app platform, WOZCODE the developer tool.
He coined the foil before the fix. "Vibe coding" is the thing to avoid; everything Woz does is defined against it.
Among the backers is the Lacob family, co-owners of the Golden State Warriors. The cap table has courtside seats.
Strip away the jargon and Collins is making one bet: that the bottleneck on software was never imagination, it was access. Plenty of small-business owners, creators, side-hustlers and consultants have an app-shaped idea and no way to ship it. Woz aims to hand them a foreman, a line, and a quality inspector - and let the idea walk out the door as a real product.
He's described as fearless, and as someone moved more by the idea of empowerment than by fame or profit - making tech that anyone can use. It's an old-fashioned motivation dressed in very new tools. The reach is deliberately enormous: not one app, but the capacity to build thousands in parallel, each one clean enough to pass review. Whether the App Factory becomes the next great leap or one promising station along the way, Collins has been clear about the direction. Describe it in plain English. Let the line do the rest.