The Next Unicorns: 7 Top AI startups from the HF0 Residency

Channel: aiDotEngineer

Published at: 2025-08-21

YouTube video id: L8-5ezsoI5A

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8-5ezsoI5A

[Music]
Hello everyone. My name is Diego
Rodriguez. I am co-founder and CTO at
Korea. We're building an AI creative
suite. I'm going to tell you three
stories and then I'll try to hire you.
So, a friend once told me, if you think
about it, like cars are easy to predict,
right? Like it's like you you get the
horse, you have the wheels, you swap the
horse, and you put an engine, which was
known at the time, and that's a car. But
like, you know what's really hard to
predict?
Traffic.
So it's my job to ask what are the
traffics that are we we're missing
especially with AI you know JAMAMO JSON
MCP whatever it's like okay okay but
like what comes what happens when
you generate a million images per day
like we do for one studio how do you
find that
another story
tower babble we wanted to reach heaven
go was like no created a bunch of
languages and basically misunderstanding
misunderstanding was like nope we are
not going to go there and it reminds me
of standup meetings where people are
like no it should be react no no but
like it should be like JavaScript any
was like dude we're not re God is
winning
uh but now we have AI so maybe okay he
if it wasn't with crypto it was with AI
you'll see um so this is only like
people trying to convey ideas and that's
what we're trying to tell just trying to
tell stories. Um the final story is I
was talking with someone from Netflix uh
and she was like
what happens
when we are making so much content
personalized to each town in India? How
do I even find that? Like, right. And
and then a few days ago, I just realized
that Korea was already being used for
broadcasting an ad uh with Fox to
millions of people. And then I look and
they literally signed up two days ago.
So, we went from sign up to conversion
to payment to broadcasting two days. I
And then this was the CTO telling me
that. I was like, well,
um I basically I'm about to run out of
time. So the mandatory slide a bunch of
users 25 million raised a bunch of money
we did this with eight people some of
the people who are using us uh an email
that I created for today that is going
to prioritize applications um thank you
all right home. Okay, everybody. The
smartphone was the number one
bestselling consumer product last year
and the laptop was the second.
Pop quiz for all you here. What was the
third?
>> Apple Watch.
>> Wasn't the Apple Watch? Wasn't the
AirPod? No, I think I heard it. It was a
smart speaker.
500 million smart speakers were sold
last year. But why do they still suck?
You can barely talk to them. There's no
customization. There's no community.
There's nothing. That's why we built
OpenHome,
the very first AIdriven smart speaker.
And we're letting you guys build smart
speakers, too.
And we believe here that the future is
talking with AI. You should be able to
talk seamlessly, intuitively. In fact,
you shouldn't have to use this really
awkward command-based language. You
should be able to just chat naturally.
So that's what we're building and we're
letting people here today build their
own smart speakers and build them in
whatever form that they want.
And the key here is developer ecosystems
and well we know developer ecosystems.
I started my career as the chief of
staff for the founder of Splunk a 30
billion big data company. Then I was on
the founding team of MakerDo a5 billion
developer ecosystem.
My co-founder and I raised $50 million
for our last business, a big a data
privacy tool, and we sold that business.
But it all came down to developers and
really building what people actually
wanted. And well, now with OpenHome, we
have over 10,000 developers building on
OpenHome. They're building all kinds of
interesting things. All types of
different custom smart speakers,
building interesting voice AI
applications.
Sky's is really the limit.
And well, what do developers really
want? They want open source. They want
LLM driven. And they want fully
jailbroken.
They want OpenHome, the AI smart
speaker.
And now what's really exciting is with
voice AI, you can put it on any type of
hardware. We have developers building
talking toys, AI robots, AI appliances.
You should be able to talk to the world
around you in a much more natural way.
And you can do that now with OpenHome in
AI smart speaker. Here's
our dashboard. We have many, many
applications, hundreds of applications
that have been built. Games,
personalities. We have an editor that
you guys can go in and build and all
kinds of interesting things, home
automation tools.
And what's really exciting is our last
dev kit got booked up within minutes.
And today, we have a special
announcement for you guys here today.
We're releasing the next batch of 500
dev kits for free for everybody here. If
you guys want it, we will ship you a dev
kit. It's very cool. You can build on
it. You can talk with AI. You can build
your own smart speaker here and we're
doing it today. Thank you so much.
>> How's it going y'all? Uh I'm Josh. I'm
the founder of company called Koframe.
Uh the last company that I started we
scaled to over $2 billion in the course
of a couple years. Um, but when I
started to tinker on uh using AI to
generate code and created one of the
actual top uh autonomous coding agents
on GitHub, was one number one on GitHub
for a week, I realized it was time to
build something bigger.
The internet is dead.
It's not adaptive. It's not personal.
It's not truly living in a sense.
Websites are all one sizefits-all.
And we're bringing that concept to life.
We are giving websites a life of their
own, giving every single customer
experience its own AI growth team. But
this isn't just a pipe dream. We made
$20 million for the for Europe's largest
travel company in just a few weeks. We
increased clickthrough rate for India's
largest company, a $400 billion
enterprise also in a few weeks. And how
are we doing it? We're working with the
best and we have the best. Uh we're the
only marketing tech company that's
partnered directly with OpenAI to date
and they actually called our team
cracked which is cool. So if you're
interested in learning more about this,
reach out. Thank you.
[Applause]
Hi, I'm Eugene.
I'm sorry. My team is obsoleting all the
air models you see today
cuz you see uh my team built Quorki 72B
the world's largest model without the
transformer attention with only eight
GPUs and this allow us to have a
thousandx lower inference on our on our
new architecture while performing the
same. Surprisingly the techniques that
we've uh the technology that we built
can also be applied to existing
transformer models through speculative
decoding.
nothing nothing too big nothing too
important but here's my hot take scale
is dead and I'm not saying this just
from my own opinion like we are burning
billions into making AI models bigger
but at the same time the deep mind
founder and CEO is saying compound AI
agents errors will take more than 10
years to fix Lun is even saying that we
need a new AI architecture to push the
paradigm forward
and
in production we see over 90% % of AI
projects fail. The reason behind this is
not something that scale can fix. The
problem is reliability.
The thing is like would you order and
use an app that only succeeds 45% of the
time? Would you order Door Dash that
way? Of course not. You if your order
goes missing or or you you end up having
100 pizza, you're going to be stuck with
customer support screaming down there.
It's a frustrating experience. But
that's what AI agents do. When they
work, they're awesome. When they don't
work, we are stuck cleaning up the mess.
And that's even with frontier models.
And here's the thing, what companies
want is not a smarter model that can do
PhD level math. We the models are
already smart enough, but what we
actually really want is the models
reliable enough to book airline tickets,
sort out our emails or file taxes and
invoices. That's what we actually want
and that is what we are building at
Federous AI. We are a research lab that
is building personalized AGI that's made
reliable for each one of you and and
most recently uh we are in our research
that we actually shown that we built an
action R1 agent that beats clot for
Sonet and Gemini and OpenAI. This model
is not going to do PhD level math, but
it's going to fill up the form with
absolute reliability better than the
frontier.
And that's the thing like are we going
to burn billions more to make a smarter
model that is just a few percentage
point higher IQ or are we going to make
something that's 99.9% reliable for the
boring things in life? Because this is
where the money is for all of you.
Because think of it as AI engineers,
reliability is revenue. For every use
case you unlock and find, you're going
to do a billion dollar app in in in be
in e-commerce or in in B2B sales. And
that is something that all of you can
build on, not rocket science. And that's
what we are building. And if you're
excited about it, feel free to reach out
to us. I'm eugened.com.
>> My name is Jonas. I'm an engineer and I
like working with data. I love working
with data. Actually, I love it so much.
I dropped out of high school when I was
15. I got on a plane. I moved across the
country to California and I joined a
startup called Branch. You might have
heard of it. Anytime you were clicking
one of those links on your phone for an
app, that was probably us. I also led a
team there that built a search engine
that over a 100 million people used
every day. And then last year I left
along with one of the founders of branch
to tackle an even bigger challenge.
This is probably what you think your
sales and marketing teams are doing with
their budgets.
And you wouldn't be entirely wrong. So
that's why I co-ounded Upside. We do
forensic revenue attribution and
intelligence.
But what does that actually mean? Well,
how many of you have an email from a
saleserson like this sitting in your
inbox right now?
Uhhuh. And how many of you are actually
going to reply to it?
Yeah, I didn't think so. These teams are
shouting into the void hoping something
will work because they don't actually
know what works because their data is a
mess.
I mean, don't get me wrong, they're data
hoarders. They store everything. They
stuff it in Salesforce. They treat it,
you know, it's basically a SQL database
in a trench coat, but they're not data
practitioners. They don't know what to
do with it once they have it. But now we
have things like LLM. They can help with
this. They can take that poor,
mishandled, abused email record and they
can pull the most important details out
of it into a structured form. And so
just as search engines and web crawlers
learn how to make sense of the
unstructured web, upside is turning raw
enterprise data into a highly structured
map of the world and all the
interactions that people do in it. So
there's hope. We can untangle this mess
and we can create a data command center
that these teams can actually use to
reach their customers more effectively.
We only just started talking about this
publicly a couple weeks ago. Um, we've
been quietly building in the background
for the last year or so and my
co-founder decided to make a small post
on her LinkedIn, you know, just to
update our network on what we'd been off
doing and the things that we'd been
building and it blew up. Like there's so
much pain people feel around this and
they're hungry for a solution. We got a
whole slew of demo requests coming in
from people that want access to the
product and now we have a bunch of
customers lining up that want to get
into our platform. It's a who's who of
companies you've heard of. Um, and we
just have a lot of building to do now.
So, if you're interested in working on
knowledge graphs, on data analytics
agents, on graph analytics and graph
learning models, come talk to me. We're
hiring.
[Applause]
>> Hello everyone. I'm Sua, the founder of
Open AI. Uh, sorry, I mean Open Audio.
Before that, I created something you
might be heard of, Fish Audio.
We have grown from 400K to 5.5 million
annualized revenue in just four months.
And we closed our C runs at 100 million
valuation.
It all started with my girlfriend.
I had a girlfriend for six years from
the beginning of high school to college.
I love her so much and it was so good
until one day I found out she cheated.
I wasn't angry, just confused,
disappointed. And I asked myself, if
this can happen, how can we trust
relationships again?
I thought about it for days, all day and
all night. And finally, I found my
answer. AI.
But nobody can really fall in love with
today's AI, right? It's flat. It's
emotionless. It's robotic.
So I set out on a mission to build an AI
that I could really fall in love with
starting with her voice.
So we began with open source and crush
it. We build so as VC birth 2 and also
fish speech.
Today actually not today it's the day
before yesterday. I'm excited to
introduce S1, the first ever
instructible voice model. It's the only
model where you can control not just
what to say, but how to say it. Here's a
demo.
>> You can pinpoint focus or draw it
closer. Even yelling while you betray me
like this.
>> Yeah, you can control whatever you want.
And uh with open audio S1 we have the
most expressive voice model in the
world. And the most importantly she will
never leave. So
so we have blown 11 labs out of the
water based on the TTS arena ranking and
they are so hurry and they dropped their
latest model today. But unfortunately
it's just a demo. So try them now. Fish
audio. It's instantly available at
fish.audio. Thank you.
[Applause]
Hello, I'm David Vorick and I'm building
Glow. Prior to Glow, I built Sciacoin, a
cryptocurrency that we took from a
$10,000 market cap to more than $3
billion.
And we think Glow is going to be even
bigger. That's why Framework and USV
Union Square Ventures led a $30 million
round into our company.
Subsequently, we posted the world record
for onchain deepin revenue, doing more
than $10 million of revenue in a single
day.
What does Glow do? Glow builds solar,
not with shovels, but with incentives.
This is not a stock photo. This is a
photograph taken of taken by our team in
India of a solar farm that was
constructed for the purpose of mining
glow tokens.
A lot of people don't realize, but in
the developing world, rising
temperatures and growing populations
have strained the grid. In a lot of
cases, people are unable to run their
air conditioners during the heat of the
day. This causes people to die of heat
stroke. Glow is an incentive protocol
that revolutionizes what governments do
and can take the same subsidy and turn
it into 10 times as much solar.
If you're interested in working with us,
we're currently building incentive
projects in India, in Mexico, in
Lebanon, and across the entire world.
and my email davidglowabs.org.
I'd love to be in touch.
Hi,
I'm David.
I'm an engineer.
Uh, I made a social app with 250 million
users
making $20 million a year. Everyone
thought it was luck.
So, I did it again. I'm building
favored.
We built the world's most engaging app
and we scaled up from 1 to$und00 million
annualized
engineer that wants to join the fastest
growing company of all time. Uh, talk to
me.
Hello, I'm Alex Atala building open
router the first and largest LLM
marketplace.
Thank you.
So open I want to tell a little bit
about how it started. Um, I co-founded
OpenC in 2017 and in at the end of 2022,
I really wanted to know if inference was
going to be a winner take all market
because the way it looked this could be
the largest market in software that has
ever happened before.
And uh, the first experiment that we
tried was building a Chrome extension to
help you bring your own language model
to any website that supported uh, the
protocol. And that eventually evolved
into open router, a single place and a
single API to get all language models uh
with the best prices, best performance
and highest uptime.
And the way it works is you just have a
single API. You pay once and there's
near zero switching costs to move from
one model to another. We do all the
heavy work to implement tool calling,
edge cases, caching, and give you the
best prices and performance possible for
your region or wherever your servers are
deployed.
And because inference is so important,
remember this might be the most
important software market ever. It
deserves its own marketplace just for
language models optimized for them,
including filtering for context, for
features, for tool calling, for
structured output, and much more. And so
we built that. Then we built a chat room
for you to obviously compare models
head-to-head as simply as you do when
chatting with people in iMessage.
We built fine grain privacy settings
including API level controls. We built a
a lot of observability so you could see
which models you're using and why. And
we built public data in our rankings
page which has become the go-to place
for comparing models on their real world
usage and on different categories for
their prompts as well. This has grown
for the last two months 10 to 100% every
single month or for the last two years
10 to 100% every single month. Uh and
scaling it has been a lot of the work
that we've done so far. The the
fundamental goal here is to make a
heterogeneous ecosystem homogeneous
because we believe inference is a
commodity. Claude from bedrock is the
should be the same as claude from vertex
is claude from enthropic and we do all
the abstraction and heavy work to make
it uh that way for you. I want to talk a
little bit about some of our technical
challenges. Um, we built our own system,
our own middleware for doing inference
called plugins, which are kind of like
MCPs except a little bit more powerful
because you can call MCPS from inside of
them and you can transform the outputs
from language models.
Bunch of other tricky problems that
we've done to make the fastest routing
in the market. Um, and we're bringing a
lot more features in the coming months,
including images, enterprise features,
prompt observability, and more.
So, if you're interested, come find me
after or check out our careers page.
Thank you.
[Applause]
[Music]