Y Combinator, the Bay Area’s most famous startup accelerator, is known for growing some of the biggest tech companies on the planet: Airbnb, Stripe, and Coinbase, just to name a few.
One of their newest projects, however, is sparking controversy — and Y Combinator has been forced to react.
From a glance, Optifye.ai is just another application to monitor employee productivity in factories and warehouses; companies like Amazon and Walmart, for example, already use surveillance technology to track worker efficiency and output.
In this case, however, founders Vivaan Baid and Kushal Mohta claim that Optifye.ai is different because it uses AI to process footage of assembly lines “to tell supervisors who's working and who's not in real time.” The model trains itself in three days, according to its website, and can “boost your assembly line efficiency by up to 30%.”
Baid and Mohta both studied computer science at Duke and have parents who operate manufacturing plants abroad.
Shortly after posting a congratulatory message to the founders of Optifye.ai on X and LinkedIn on Monday, the Y Combinator account abruptly deleted the post on both sites. It also appears to have deleted a video of the two founders demonstrating a potential conversation with a factory worker based on live data about their productivity.
“You haven’t hit your hourly output even once today… this is really bad,” Baid says.
“It’s just been a rough day,” Mohta replies off-camera.
“More like a rough month!” Baid replies while pulling up a productivity chart.
The backtrack was noticed by a coterie of tech industry observers, who mocked and criticized the company. Hank Medina, the infamous meme-influencer founder of venture capital brand Litquidity, joked that Optifye.ai is an “early standout” for “optimizing sweatshops and slave labor output.” Others questioned the value of the new company, given the existing proliferation of employee-monitoring tech.
That Y Combinator had to pull its public posts in support of the project suggests it is acknowledging the public blowback, as niche as it may be (much of the discourse remains on social media, primarily X). It is an unusual move for a company that has rarely, if ever, backtracked from its chosen startups.
(Y Combinator and Optifye.ai did not respond to immediate requests for comment.)
Nonetheless, Optifye.ai appears to be moving ahead with development. Baid and Mohta claim that factory owners will benefit significantly from the program, especially as it will eliminate the “need to rely on your production head (who never has the incentive to say production looks terrible).”
“We’ll help them drop their cortisol levels :),” they conclude in their official Y Combinator profile.
