pivoted – NewsNow

These YC founders pivoted 5 times before building a social app that nabbed 300K users and over $1M ARR in 6 months

September 25, 2025 by DON

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 … Read more

Why Cartken pivoted its focus from last-mile delivery to industrial robots

July 20, 2025 by DON

Autonomous robotics startup Cartken, known for its four-wheeled robots that deliver food on college campuses and through Tokyo’s bustling streets, has found a new area of focus: industrials. Cartken co-founder and CEO Christian Bersch told TechCrunch that applying its delivery robots to industrial settings was always in the back of his mind as they built … Read more

Why a Y Combinator startup tackling AI agents for Windows gave up and pivoted

July 18, 2025 by DON

A startup called Pig.dev that participated in Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 batch was working on a potential revolutionary idea: AI agentic tech to control a Microsoft Windows desktop. But in May, the founder announced he was abandoning the tech and pivoting his company to something entirely different: Muscle Mem, a cache system for AI agents … Read more