A couple of months ago, the founders behind YC-backed social app Candle were in "pivot hell," cycling through more than a dozen ideas after joining Y Combinator's Fall 2024 batch, while the clock on their seed money ticked down. Alex Ruber, previously an engineer at Apple, and Parth Chopra, formerly an engineer at Asana and Twitter, had built multiple projects together including Encore, a conversational AI shopping tool that got them into YC and with which they raised $2 million.
A new AI startup pivoted from automating appointment bookings for hair salons to building an AI voice assistant that handles non-emergency calls for 911 call centers - and it just raised a $14 million Series A for its new focus on Wednesday. Max Keenan, the founder of Y Combinator-backed startup Aurelian, decided to pivot the company in response to a call from one of his clients, reports TechCrunch. The client, a hair salon owner, had a problem with a school's carpool lane blocking the salon's parking lot.