pivot
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AICE
AICE is a San Francisco defense-tech startup building autonomous swarms of modular underwater drones to monitor and protect naval assets and coastal infrastructure. Backed by Y Combinator (P26), the company was founded by ex-NASA MIT aerospace engineer Gregoire Chomette and European robotics champion Remi Bouteiller, who pivoted from commercial-building energy sensors to subsea defense after talking to submariners about the gaps in current underwater robotics.
Craze
Craze is a Y Combinator (S22) company that reinvented itself into an AI video maker at craze.ai - a tool that plans, edits and turns creative direction into finished videos. Founded in 2022 by Kabir Nagral and Deepit Patil, Craze began as an HR, payroll and compliance platform for Indian founders before shutting that product down in 2025 and rebuilding around AI, first as a general 'do things with AI' agent layer and now as a creative video studio.
Pivot (YC S22)
Pivot (YC S22) is a San Francisco startup building an AI FP&A analyst - an 'AI workforce' that helps founders and finance teams visualize, analyze, and model company financial data faster than Excel. Founded by Raimie Tang and backed by Y Combinator's Summer 2022 batch, Pivot turns raw transaction-level data into reports and dashboards in minutes, automating the grunt work of financial planning and analysis for early-stage companies trying to scale.
Vadim Ogievetsky
Vadim Ogievetsky is the Co-Founder and Chief Experience Officer of Imply, the commercial company behind Apache Druid - the real-time analytics database powering data infrastructure at Netflix, Salesforce, Reddit, and 150+ enterprises. One of the original four co-authors of Apache Druid (launched 2011), he also co-created D3.js at Stanford's Visualization Group - the JavaScript charting library that became the foundation of modern data visualization on the web. Before Imply, he was UI Lead at Metamarkets (acquired by Snap). He built Plywood and Pivot, open-source tools for querying and exploring Druid data, and created KoalasToTheMax, a beloved interactive D3 visualization. Imply raised $215M total and reached unicorn status with a $100M Series D in May 2022.
Stewart Butterfield
Stewart Butterfield is a Canadian technology entrepreneur and angel investor who co-founded Flickr (2004) and Slack (2013) — two landmark products that emerged as accidental pivots from failed multiplayer games. A self-taught coder with a Cambridge philosophy degree, Butterfield sold Flickr to Yahoo for ~$25 million in 2005 and Slack to Salesforce for $27.7 billion in 2021. His 'We Don't Sell Saddles Here' memo became a canonical document in Silicon Valley product thinking. Since departing Slack in January 2023, he has been active as an angel investor with 32+ portfolio companies.