consumer-ai
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Andrey Usoltsev and the second first time
He helped turn photographs into paintings with Prisma, then became CEO. Six years after that first viral hit, Lensa gave Andrey Usoltsev another surprise - and a much bigger set of questions.
Ken Chong and the Last Twenty Minutes of Dinner
At All Day Kitchens, Ken Chong tried to bring neighborhood restaurants closer to the people who loved them. His next venture puts an AI assistant inside the group chat where dinner plans begin.
Martín Alcalá Rubí and the barbecue theory of artificial intelligence
Tryolabs began in a borrowed barbecue space in Montevideo. For Martín Alcalá Rubí, the route from that makeshift office to Zapia runs through Python, a text-reading monkey, Silicon Valley coffee meetings, and a rather serious music habit.
Eugenia Kuyda Is Betting That the Next Social Network Will Be Made of Apps
After teaching software to hold a conversation, the former journalist behind Replika wants everyone to make tiny apps. Her new wager is that software itself can become a social medium.
Andréa Mallard Keeps Choosing the Bigger Adventure
A stranded would-be correspondent learned to interview Paris over a pint, then carried that curiosity through IDEO, Pinterest and Microsoft AI. Her career is a case study in choosing the less obvious door - and knowing when a title is only one part of a life.
Brandon McGraw Is Teaching AI to Make Sense to People
Before taking on OpenAI's consumer and hardware marketing, Brandon McGraw spent years translating new technology into ordinary language - and two years building an AI journal that could remember the person using it.
Lucky Zhang Wants You to Stop Scrolling and Start Making
After two acquisitions and a 30-million-user music service, the serial founder is betting that software will become a social medium - made in seconds, remixed in public, and far more participatory than another feed.
Karandeep Anand Is Turning the Chatbot Into a Story World
After two decades building platforms at Microsoft, Meta, and Brex, Karandeep Anand has a new product brief: make AI entertainment feel less like a prompt box and more like a world people can enter.
Omar Abdelaziz Is Teaching the iPhone to Do the Tapping
He started by fixing used iPhones. After six years shaping Google’s voice products, Omar Abdelaziz has returned to the device in his pocket - this time with a small blue plug and a larger idea about who should do the busywork.
Harry Zheng Is Building the Box Office After the Box Office
The former Google and TikTok engineer began with a better creative workflow. He ended up challenging the economics of who gets to make a film, who pays for it, and who owns the audience.
Akshay Sanghai Is Building an English Classroom That Talks Back
The MySivi co-founder left large-company engineering for a harder systems problem: giving millions of learners a patient place to practise, make mistakes and speak again.
Pradeep Elankumaran Keeps Building the Errand Away
Three YC companies, one enduring habit: find the recurring annoyance, test it in public, then engineer the repetition out of everyday life.
Haz Hubble Is Teaching AI to Remember the People We Forget
He left school, learned the language of finance, rebuilt his startup in code, and made it into Y Combinator. Now Pally's co-founder is betting that the most useful AI will sit quietly inside our relationships.
Ryan Holmes Put Earth in a Headset. Now He Wants Dinner in One Sentence.
Ryan Holmes once sold his car to help finance a camera for space. A decade later, the JetBuy founder is chasing a more domestic frontier: ordering your usual with Siri before your thumb reaches the screen.
Krish Iyengar Is Turning the Family Screen Into a Tiny Studio
He built five mobile apps, won four hackathons with a friend from second grade, and left Purdue. Now Krish Iyengar wants children to direct the stories on their screens - and is using the same machinery to rethink video production.
Dave Zohrob Keeps Following the Glitch
A strange download spike became Chartable. A childhood coding habit became a career. Now the founder of Nori is proving that his real product is a durable way of noticing what does not make sense yet.
Kashyap Achar Sent 1,523 Cold Emails. Then a Football in Central Park Changed the Plot.
The Bezel founder’s career is a study in useful motion: ship the small thing, follow the signal, change the product, and keep asking strangers to play catch.
Connor Waslo Is Teaching AI the Fine Art of Leaving You Alone
The Caddy co-founder went from coding through class to cutting a polished feature. His current product thesis is disarmingly simple: a useful assistant knows when to act, when to ask and when to keep quiet.
Tyler Fallon Is Building the Person You Call Before the Contractor
After years helping software companies turn payroll into a product, Tyler Fallon moved one question upstream: before a homeowner hires anyone, who helps them decide what actually needs doing? Casa is his two-person answer.
Andrea Campos Is Teaching an App to Speak Human
The Yana founder turned a hand-built chat experiment into a multilingual consumer platform. Now, from San Francisco, she is working on the harder problem: making artificial intelligence feel useful, culturally fluent and responsibly constrained.
Stanley Wei
Stanley Wei is the CEO and co-founder of Pine AI (19pine.ai), a San Francisco startup building an autonomous AI agent that fights consumers' customer-service battles for them: negotiating bills, cancelling subscriptions, disputing overcharges, and chasing refunds through real phone calls and emails. A former Chief Strategy and Operating Officer at Nasdaq-listed Agora and a former investor at Hillhouse Capital, Wei founded Pine in late 2024 after a $200 dispute with his bank ate up 90 minutes of his life. Pine raised a $25 million Series A in December 2025 and reports more than $37 million in consumer savings.
Michael Zacharski
Michael Zacharski is a strategic technology executive with more than 20 years in programmatic advertising and consumer AI. He is Interim CEO of Decide (formerly LockerDome) in St. Louis, following a career that includes CEO roles at EMX Digital / ENGINE Media Exchange, bRealTime, Balihoo, and Brand Engagement Network (Nasdaq: BNAI), plus advisory work through his own firm M2M5 Co and Progress Partners.
Dorian Dargan
Dorian Dargan is the co-founder and CEO of Doji, an AI fashion app that turns selfies into a photorealistic digital likeness so people can try on real clothes from across the web and actually have fun doing it. An MIT-trained designer-engineer who built avatars at Meta on Oculus Quest and shaped visionOS at Apple, he teamed up with former DeepMind researcher Jim Winkens - the name Doji is literally Dorian plus Jim - and within days of the app's 2025 App Store debut raised a $14M seed round led by Thrive Capital with Alexis Ohanian's Seven Seven Six. He treats the creative process as something close to sacred, and is betting that the most personal way to shop online is to first fall a little in love with the image of yourself.
Michael Xing
Michael Xing is the co-founder and CEO of Pingo AI (YC S25), a language-learning app that builds fluency by letting people talk with an AI tutor in real-life conversations. The idea grew out of weekly Chinese practice sessions with his freshman-year college roommate Morrie Schonfeld. After launching in January 2025, Pingo scaled from zero to hundreds of thousands of users and millions in ARR in under a year, becoming one of Y Combinator's fastest-growing consumer companies and a Google Play Best of 2025 winner. Before Pingo, Xing spent roughly three years at AI startups and built a Chrome extension with 150,000+ downloads.
Anada Lakra
Anada Lakra is the co-founder and CEO of BoldVoice, an AI-powered accent and speech coaching app for non-native English speakers. Born and raised in Albania, she studied English for a decade before arriving at Yale, where being asked to repeat herself sparked the idea that became BoldVoice. After Yale and an MBA from Harvard Business School, with product stints at Peloton and consulting work along the way, she and co-founder Ilya Usorov built a Y Combinator-backed app that pairs Hollywood dialect coaches with real-time AI feedback. BoldVoice has crossed 5 million downloads, serves professionals in 150+ countries, reached $10M+ in ARR with a team of seven, and raised a $21M Series A in January 2026 led by Matrix.
Jason Paul
Jason Paul is Vice President of GeForce Platform Marketing at NVIDIA, where he has worked since 2003. Over more than two decades, he has led the marketing and launch of every major GeForce GPU generation, pioneered NVIDIA's SHIELD gaming ecosystem, championed GameWorks VR, and now spearheads the company's consumer AI push connecting RTX hardware to over 100 million Windows users. Educated at UCLA and Stanford (MBA), Paul sits at the crossroads of gaming hardware, software platforms, and the emerging era of on-device AI.
Alex Mashrabov
Alex Mashrabov is the CEO and co-founder of Higgsfield AI, a $1.3B AI video generation unicorn that went from $0 to $50M ARR in five months. A 2x ACM ICPC World Finals competitive programmer who began coding at 10, he previously co-founded AI Factory — acquired by Snap for $166M in 2020 — and later served as Snap's Head of Generative AI. Born in Andijan, Uzbekistan, and trained at Moscow's elite MIPT, he is now building Higgsfield into the infrastructure layer for AI video creation, targeting the moment when most social media video is AI-generated.
Jay Dang
Jay Dang (Jiacheng Dang) is the co-founder and CEO of Kaon (formerly FlowGPT), an AI-native content platform he launched in January 2023 just two days after founding the company - at age 20 during his freshman year at UC Berkeley. He subsequently dropped out to lead FlowGPT full-time, growing the platform to 3+ million monthly active users and 100,000+ AI applications across 110 countries before raising a $10M pre-Series A round in February 2024 led by Goodwater Capital and DCM Ventures. Under his leadership, the company rebranded to Kaon and launched Emochi, an AI storytelling app that reached #12 globally with 12.3M monthly active users by April 2026.
Omar Shaya
Omar Shaya is the Founder and CEO of Please (formerly MultiOn), a Palo Alto-based AI company building a life planning platform that bridges the gap between what people dream of doing and what they actually achieve. Born in Syria to a Venezuelan mother and Lebanese father, raised across Syria, Germany, and the UK before landing in Silicon Valley, Shaya brings a multicultural perspective to democratizing personal assistance through AI. With an MS from Stanford GSB, dual BS/MS in Computer Science from Göttingen University, and prior product leadership at Meta and Microsoft, he founded MultiOn in 2023, raised a $20M seed round led by General Catalyst at a $100M valuation, then rebranded to Please in early 2025 to signal a gentler, more human approach to AI assistance.
Connor Zwick
Connor Zwick is the CEO and co-founder of Speak, an AI-powered language learning platform that crossed $1 billion in valuation and $100 million in annualized revenue in 2024. A Thiel Fellow who dropped out of Harvard, Zwick built his first app at age 13 and sold Flashcards+ to Chegg as a teenager. He founded Speak in 2016 with Andrew Hsu, and spent years living between San Francisco and Seoul to perfect AI conversation technology for English learners. Today Speak counts over 15 million downloads, backing from OpenAI and Accel, and enterprise customers including KPMG and HD Hyundai.