Y Combinator’s Winter 2023 batch features many startups that are creating “ChatGPT for X”, inspired by OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT chatbot. One of them is Yuma, which focuses on providing AI-powered customer service solutions to Shopify merchants. Founder Guillaume Luccisano had released the prototype of Yuma as a fun project in December 2022, and soon after the overwhelming demand saw him investing serious time into developing the project into a professionally-run business. Yuma works by training AI models on historical customer tickets, all the while mimicking a brand’s style and offering translations.
Another startup to have come out of Y Combinator’s 2023 batch is Baselit, which uses OpenAI’s GPT-3 text-generating model to allow businesses to embed AI-powered analytics for customers. It enables users to query the data in plain language and then the relevant structured query language is generated automatically. Results can then be exported to popular visualisation tools such as Tableau, Excel, Google Sheets and Power BI.
Then there’s Lasso, which combines a ChatGPT-like interface with robotic process automation and a Chrome extension. Customers provide descriptions or videos of the processes they’d like to be automated and Lasso’s tooling builds out the automation. Lasso competes with other RPA behemoths such as UiPath and Automation Anywhere, while its founders have previously worked at Google and helped launch AI-based apps like the AI Test Kitchen and Pixel Buds Pro.
Finally, BerriAI is a platform designed to help developers spin up ChatGPT apps for organization data, charging $999 per month for its services. It acts as the intermediary between customers and ChatGPT, allowing users to prototype, share and push template configs to create multiple instances. Companies can thus build interfaces powered by ChatGPT to ask questions about internal documents or automate customer support requests.
As mentioned this article, the four companies are being backed by Y Combinator and are attempting to capitalize on the hype around ChatGPT and the possibilities it offers. Among startups in this space, they face competition in the form of Writer, Forethought, Lang, Neuron7, Ultimate.ai, Borealis AI and Defog, who are all in the race to acquire customers within an estimated $58.1 billion customer service software market. It will be interesting to see which of these companies, if any, are ultimately successful in achieving success.
The founder of Yuma, Guillaume Luccisano, is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of not just Yuma, but also Socialcam and Triplebyte. Socialcam was a mobile photo-sharing app that was acquired by Autodesk in 2012, while Triplebyte is a recruiting and technical screening platform for tech companies. He previously worked with Google, as part of their Creative Lab 5, where his team launched successful AI-based apps like the Pixel Buds Pro and AI Test Kitchen.
The two other co-founders of Lasso, Gautom Bose and Lucas Ochoa, are also experienced in the tech space. Bose is a senior software engineer at AI-based healthcare startup Zebra Medical Vision, and previously worked on machine translation systems in Google. Ochoa owes his expertise to many years of experience in building workflows, starting out with direct experience as a productivity and analytics engineer at Apple and a machine learning engineer at Google.
Both Yuma and Lasso draw pressingly from ChatGPT’s technical underpinnings, while the former heavily focuses on a customer service use case while the latter uses the virality of ChatGPT to attempt to challenge the major RPA players in the market. Whatever the outcome, companies like Yuma, Baselit, Lasso and BerriAI are testament to the tremendous potential of ChatGPT and what it can offer in an enterprise landscape.
