🏁 The Bulletin #56: Forecasting AI Trends from YC's Newest Batch, Visa Getting Sued Over Monopoly Claims
Welcome back! In this week's bulletin -- a dramatic rise in AI startups in YC's accelerator, what they tell us about the future, and an antitrust lawsuit against a digital transaction giant.🌟
Hello, reader! I’m so happy to see you this morning! (afternoon? evening??)
Regardless, thanks so much for stopping by.💌✨
💡For this semester, keep up with our content if you’re interested in:
Demystifying & breaking into VC
Finding opportunities in the start-up world
Keeping up with VC investment news at Brown & beyond (pro tip: this is essential to breaking in and finding opportunities)
🔮 Can YC Tell the Future?
The Y Combinator summer ‘24 cohort touted a whopping 200 AI startups which accounted for 75% of the total cohort – up from 50% the previous season.📈 The AI investment space is booming, and as an accelerator and early investor, YC’s cohort and investments can tell us a lot about the future of AI trends.🪄
According to PitchBook, 4 main trends came out of YC’s summer ‘24 batch: AI-powered robots, AI for web navigation, job transformation, and tools for developers.
1. AI-Powered Robots 🤖
Advances in AI are enabling robots to learn tasks by mimicking human actions.
Yondu develops robots to fill retail jobs – its first robot stocks and organizes grocery shelves.
Azalea Robotics automates airport baggage handling with robot operations.
2. AI for Web Navigation 🌎
AI tools are streamlining the process of browsing the internet and navigating software.
Lighthouz AI is building AI procurement specialists for manufacturers to save time and money.
CardLift builds co-branded browser extensions to help credit card issuers maximize utilization rates.
3. Job Transformation 💼
AI is increasingly automating mundane tasks across various industries.
Olive Legal uses AI to summarize client medical records for personal injury lawyers.
Abel Police takes police body camera footage and turns it into completed police reports.
4. Developer Tools 👩💻
New tools are being developed to help improve the optimization of foundational AI models for developers.
Wordware is a new ‘programming language’ that merges plain English with concepts like loops, conditional statements, and functions calling for AI developers to build apps quickly.
Pipeshift offers a platform for fine-tuning, distilling, and inferencing open-source LLMs for engineering teams to get to production faster.
💰 Lawsuit Against Visa
The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) is challenging Visa’s dominance in the debit card market, raising questions about competition and consumer costs in a system where every swipe counts. Currently, Visa processes more than 60% of debit transactions within the U.S., and the fees from these transactions bring in a whopping $7B a year for the digital payments giant.💸
This past week, the DOJ officially filed a lawsuit against Visa, accusing them of a monopoly on debit card use. The complaint alleges that Visa has violated antitrust laws which were established to shield smaller competitors and businesses from predatory behavior.🐅 In addition to squashing competition, the DOJ claims that Visa is passing on the fees to consumers, raising the price of goods for Americans. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland elaborates, “We allege that Visa has unlawfully amassed the power to extract fees that far exceed what it could charge in a competitive market.”
A deeper analysis done by PSR found that Visa does not face effective competition in the area of processing services.❌ In addition, Visa provides their customers with unclear pricing statements and gives them limited room to negotiate. The study found that in the last 5 years, Visa increased their fees by more than 30%. Chris Hemsley, the Managing Director of PSR explains, “These fees have significantly increased over recent years, and those increases cannot be explained by improvement in service quality … Competition does not appear to be protecting businesses effectively.”
Visa firmly claims that these complaints have no merit. Only time will tell the outcome, but if the lawsuit against Visa means a lower cost of goods for consumers — I don’t think anyone will be complaining.😉
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That’s it for this week, feel free to email me at abigail_gonzalez@brown.edu with any inquiries!
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