At Y+, we believe that early-stage funding for consumer AI needs a new approach—one designed to recognize and nurture the unique characteristics of this market.

1. Founders often come from nontraditional, outlier backgrounds.

• Many of the most exceptional founders in consumer AI are the first-time founders, college students, immigrants, minorities, and women. Their lived experiences fuel original insights and disruptive ideas.
• At Y+, we are committed to finding and supporting these outlier founders early, with the empathy, understanding, and conviction they deserve.

2. Consumer AI startups require a different lens to recognize early potential.

• Unlike enterprise AI or B2B SaaS, consumer AI companies don’t always present early traction metrics like ARR or churn rates. Instead, early signs of product-market resonance—passionate users, organic engagement, and behavioral shifts—become the indicators of future category leadership.
• At Y+, we are trained to see these early signals clearly and act decisively.

3. Winning in consumer AI requires focused insight, not reactive investing.

• We believe the best consumer AI companies are not discovered by chasing hype, but by partnering early when trust and support matter most.
• Y+ is purpose-built to identify and back these founders at the perfect moment—long before the market catches up—creating deep, lasting relationships that compound value over time.

Y+ Ventures Exists to Win the “First Mile”.

1. We understand and back outlier, nontraditional founders because we are them. Our own experiences as founders, immigrants, minorities, women and outsiders give us an instinctive ability to recognize exceptional, overlooked talent.

2. We leverage AI partnership, research-based methodologies to understand consumer insights, to identify great companies before they become obvious and to assess scalability, retention mechanisms, and unique data-driven moats before traditional financial indicators emerge.

3. We invest early—ideally as the first check—and double down on winners to form long-term partnerships from day one, ensuring that we maximize the returns for our limited partners and help shape the most transformative consumer AI companies of the future from day one.

Y+ is about staying on the upper side of the Y-axis—value—as time moves forward along the X-axis. It’s also about systematically finding, funding, and amplifying the exceptional outliers who are obsessed to build next category-defining companies in consumer AI applications as early as possible.