Post by Jeremy Ro

You ever wonder who's behind Y Combinator's W25 hottest B2B startups? These are the 22 founders building real B2B tech: 1. ThirdLayer (YC W25) – AI coworker that organizes and automates your life. - Regina Lin can see things three ways (left eye farsighted, right nearsighted) and wore a pirate eyepatch as a kid... Grew up as a classical pianist and performed a 25-min Rachmaninov concerto. - Kevin Gu studied algorithm textbooks growing up and dropped a quant trading offer to build Dex. - Abhi Ravipati left investment banking at PJT to come to SF on a whim. - Nick Tarmossin: Tarmo grew Dex's Instagram to 10k followers in a week, personal to 50k+. - Charles C. left LA home plans to become Head of Product after showing Drawer. - Almas Sapar their #2 design engineer. 2. Weave – AI-first engineering analytics serving Reducto, PostHog, 11x, Nooks. → Adam Cohen raised $4.2M to solve the "$1M AI budget with 0% ROI" problem, teams see 16% higher output. → Andrew Churchill has 7k LinkedIn followers writing technical content for engineers. 3. AfterQuery – sources hard-to-get datasets for frontier AI labs. → Spencer Mateega generates millions/month, was sole summer analyst at Silver Lake, finishing CS master's + Wharton undergrad while training for half-marathons. → Danny Tang won a Microsoft AI competition and worked on the largest real-estate IPO of 2024. 4. AthenaHQ – measures brand visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini. → Andrew Yan is a former Google APM with 100+ paying customers and internal "GEO Specialist" certification. → Alan Yao built on GPT models since 2020 and prefers dark mode over sunlight. 5. Ergo (YC W25) – AI co-pilot that auto-updates Salesforce/HubSpot, saves reps 10+ hours/week. → Yash Dulla worked six years as a golf caddie (reading putts = reading pipeline). → Ishan Sheth built AI medical tools and live analytics with Snapchat Spectacles. 6. Spott – AI-native ATS/CRM replacing Bullhorn, raised $3.2M. → Lander Degrève was a Bain consultant advising recruitment agencies. → Samuel Smeys binge-watched YC videos as a teenager before joining W25. 7. Cedar – Superhuman for AEs that follows your playbook. → Jesse Li has 60+ PRs dogfooding Cedar as an OSS contributor. → Isabelle Ilyia Iliyia is a concert pianist who interned at Figma, Notion, LinkedIn. 8. Artificial Societies – simulates human audiences with AI personas. → James He, son of an illiterate villager from rural Sichuan, raised $5.35M from Point72. → Patrick Sharpe rebuilt a 2-month experiment in 2 minutes with a simulation. 9. ZeroEntropy (YC W25) – search API with a reranker that beats Cohere and Salesforce. → Ghita Houir Alami's bio reads "living intensely"—she raised $4.2M from YC and Initialized. → Nicholas Pipitone dropped out of CMU and has peer-reviewed IR papers. i'm bullish on this YC W25 group let's build :p