Published on August 13, 2025
YC Startup Pivots Summer 2024-2025
Published by Jerry Teng
Most YC startups DON’T end up building what they applied with.
They are actually encouraged to PIVOT when the founders dislike working on the idea, see no growth, or have poor founder/market fit.
Some of the biggest success stories came from pivots.
Brex started in VR before pivoting to credit cards for startups.
Retool built a Venmo for the UK before pivoting to no‑code internal tools.
Segment was a classroom lecture tool before pivoting to an API for collecting customer data (acquired by Twilio for $3.2B).
So I looked through YC startups from the past 5 batches and built a list of recent pivots:
- Pumpkin (Summer 2024) – Before: Actionbase — SDK to automate sites like LinkedIn, Amazon & Uber → After: Pumpkin — AI-powered text editor for research, writing & editing.
- Cheers (Summer 2024) – Before: SMB review cards → After: NFC employee badges for enterprise frontline teams.
- Anthrogen (Summer 2024) – Before: Protein AI foundation models → After: Genetically engineered bacteria for carbon‑negative polymers.
- Cekura (Fall 2024) – Before: General AI tools (as Vocera) → After: Testing & monitoring for AI chat + voice agents.
- Edgedive (Fall 2024) – Before: Bramble — AI‑backed real estate brokerage offering flat‑fee home buying with ~$20k rebates in California → After: Edgedive — AI-native customer intelligence tool that unifies calls, messages, tickets & CRM data for actionable insights.
- Circlemind (Fall 2024) – Before: General AI agents → After: Open‑source RAG with knowledge graphs for high‑accuracy retrieval.
- Pickle (Winter 2025) – Before: “Glass” — a passive AI assistant that observed your screen and waited for prompts → After: “Whisper” — a proactive, voice‑first AI that anticipates needs, adapts its interface & acts before you ask.
- Butter (Winter 2025) – Before: Pig.dev - AI tech to control Windows desktops → After: Butter — AI caching tool for faster performance.
- Cactus (Spring 2025) – Before: Private chef marketplace → After: AI Copilot automating solopreneur businesses.
- SynthioLabs (Spring 2025) – Before: AI lead‑gen for pharma → After: Full AI voice engagement platform for pharma sales.
- Den (Spring 2025) – Before: No‑code, multiplayer AI agent builder for non‑engineers → After: Slack/Notion‑like platform that makes creating & collaborating with AI agents seamless for any knowledge worker.
- Altur (Summer 2025) – Before: WhatsApp chatbots → After: Autonomous AI agents for debt collection & sales.
Nearly every pivot moved the company deeper into AI or toward a highly specialized AI use case.
What other startups from the recent batches have pivoted? Tag them below.