Waypoint Transit is an AI-powered urban planning platform that automates the creation of civil infrastructure studies for city governments and transit agencies. Founded in 2024 by Stanford graduates Varun Tandon and Ryan Johnston, the company replaces months of repetitive consultant work with AI-driven analysis - cutting costs by 70% and timelines from years to months. In a market where U.S. cities spend $50B annually on planning, Waypoint is already working with 10+ municipalities across the country.
Wildcard is a Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) platform that helps e-commerce brands get their products discovered and purchased through AI shopping channels like ChatGPT Shopping, Google Gemini, Amazon Rufus, and Perplexity. Founded by Kaushik Mahorker and Yagnya Patel - both veterans of Scale AI, Tesla, and Amazon - Wildcard addresses the core problem that 67% of products lack the structured attributes AI engines need to recommend them. Their platform provides SKU-level analytics, catalog optimization, and content creation tools so brands can win in the emerging AI-first commerce landscape.
Woz (WOZCODE) is a Claude Code plugin built by MIT engineers Ben Collins and Brad Eckert that cuts AI coding costs by 25-55% and speeds up most tasks by 30-40%. Instead of letting Claude Code burn tokens on bloated built-in file operations, WOZCODE replaces them with smarter, leaner alternatives - three specialized agents (code, explore, plan) that do more with less. It installs in two commands, runs locally with no data exfiltration, and works alongside your existing Claude subscription. Backed by Y Combinator (W25) and a $6M seed round, Woz is building the efficiency layer that makes AI-assisted development economically viable at scale.
YouShift is building the operating system for hospital workforce management - an AI-powered platform that automates shift scheduling, swap management, and compliance tracking for healthcare teams. Founded by three Harvard alumni, the company targets the massive inefficiency in hospital staffing: full-time administrators juggling spreadsheets, chaotic last-minute coverage, and staff burnout from unfair schedules. With 1,000+ doctors already on the platform across Europe and the US, YouShift is turning hospital scheduling from a daily fire-fight into a background process - so clinicians can focus on patients, not paperwork.
Dilawar Mahmood is a machine learning engineer at ZeroEntropy (YC W25) in San Francisco, best known for four years at Apple where he optimized on-device models for Siri and Spotlight - work he once presented directly to Tim Cook at the Steve Jobs Theater. A Norwegian-educated engineer who left a comfortable career track to attend the Recurse Center and rediscover what programming actually feels like, he builds distributed ML frameworks in his spare time and is on record hating vibe coding.
ZeroEntropy is the AI infrastructure company fixing the broken retrieval layer of modern AI applications. Founded in 2024 by Ghita Houir Alami (CEO) and Nicholas Pipitone (CTO), the San Francisco–based startup builds rerankers, embedding models, and end-to-end search infrastructure that outperforms Google, OpenAI, Cohere, and Voyage on public benchmarks. Backed by Y Combinator (W25) and a $4.2M seed round led by Initialized Capital, ZeroEntropy's products — zerank-2, zembed-1, zsearch, and ze-onprem — are used by enterprises including Assembled (serving Stripe, Canva, Robinhood, and Notion). The company's proprietary zELO training methodology, derived from chess Elo ratings and the Thurstone statistical model, produces models with calibrated relevance judgments that binary labels cannot replicate.