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Every success starts as a half baked idea. The next one could be yours
Introducing Half Baked - one startup idea in your inbox every morning from the world's best founders, operators and investors👇
Request for Startup: Media Clipping Sidebar.
@Jason is staking $5,000 on this one. The internet's biggest content category is commentary on other people's work, so here's the idea: a browser sidebar that clips any video, podcast or article you're on, lets you add your take in text or voice, and links every clip back to the source.
We've written the full spec. First to ship it to brief takes the money.
Check out the full idea breakdown in our latest newsletter 👇
read.gethalfbaked.com/p/half…
Request for Startup: Open Multiplayer Coworker.
Agentic work tools that actually finish the job are here, but the good ones are closed and tied to one lab's models. Build the open version.
Easy enough for non-engineers, plugs into whichever open-source model you like, and runs in multiplayer so a whole company works alongside the same agents rather than everyone prompting alone in their own tab.
From @Jason
Request for Startup: Raw Material Buyer's Group
One shop gets quoted $15k, another $20k for the same steel, same spec, in the same week. Small manufacturers are buying alone and paying for it.
Pool the orders, buy as one, split the savings.
From @MFG_SMB
Request for Startup: Self-Maintaining APIs.
Right now a provider ships an update and the burden lands on you. Nobody reads the release notes, so the first sign anything moved is usually a service falling over.
Coding agents already have permission to touch codebases. When a provider changes something, an agent should go and find every line of your code that depended on the old behaviour and raise the fix as a pull request you just approve.
From YC's Request for Startups, by @GaddipatiHarsha
Self-Maintaining APIs
@GaddipatiHarsha
APIs change constantly, but the way providers communicate those changes is still broken. Breaking updates go unnoticed, new features get buried in changelogs, and customers often find out only after something stops working.
Coding agents make a better model possible. Instead of announcing a change, an API provider could find every affected use in a customer’s codebase and open the pull request itself.
Request for Startup: AI-Native Compliance Infrastructure.
Expand into a new market and you inherit a new set of licences, renewals, audits and rules that look nothing like the last lot. So finance teams hire lawyers, buy another point tool, and watch the cost of staying legal climb faster than the business underneath it.
Almost none of that work needs a person. Watching for rule changes, spotting the transaction that looks off, producing the paperwork, keeping the records straight. It's continuous, tedious and mechanical, which is exactly what a machine is for.
From YC's Request for Startups, by @DaivikGoel
AI-Native Compliance Infrastructure
@DaivikGoel
Financial compliance still runs on spreadsheets, disconnected software, and growing teams of specialists. As companies expand into new markets, the cost and complexity of staying compliant can grow faster than the business itself.
AI could monitor regulatory changes, flag anomalies, generate reports, and maintain audit trails in real time. The opportunity is not just to automate compliance work, but to rebuild the entire compliance stack around AI.
Request for Startup: Proving You're Human.
A finance worker sat through a video call with his CFO and a few colleagues, then wired out twenty-five million dollars. Nobody else on that call was real.
Seeing a face and hearing a voice used to settle it. Both are now cheap to fake, and the whole internet is still running on the assumption that they aren't. Something has to fill that gap.
From YC's Request for Startups, by @maxkolysh
Proving You’re Human
@maxkolysh
A finance worker recently wired $25 million after joining a video call with his CFO and colleagues. Every other person on the call was a deepfake.
As voice and video become easier to fake, the internet needs a new trust layer: a private, reliable way to verify that there is a real human behind a call, message, review, or transaction.
Request for Startup: Data for the Real World.
Models got brilliant at code and language because there was an ocean of it to learn from. The physical world has nothing like that. Energy, farming, freight and construction run on thin readings from instruments built for people to squint at, plus a lot of experienced guesswork.
Sensors have got cheap enough to change that. Blanket a system in them, feed the readings into a model that actually holds up, and you go from guessing what a field or a grid or a storm will do to knowing. From there it's a short step to nudging the outcome.
From YC's Request for Startups, by @sdianahu and @_austintindle
Data for the Real World
@sdianahu & @_austintindle
AI has become superhuman at code, language, and images because it has enormous amounts of data to learn from. But our understanding of the physical world is still limited by sparse sensors and models built largely on intuition.
Cheaper sensors and better foundation models could unlock entirely new datasets for energy, agriculture, logistics, construction, and the climate. Once you can accurately model the physical world, you can begin to control it.
Request for Startup: Crypto.
Prices are down, the narratives have gone quiet, and plenty of founders have walked away. Meanwhile the plumbing keeps getting adopted. Banks are moving on stablecoins. Stocks are being tokenised. Agents will need a way to pay each other.
So a downturn is the sensible time to start. Nobody's competing with a scam promising impossible returns, and the people still here are building rather than waiting on a quick exit.
Everyone else left. That's the opening.
From YC's Request for Startups, by @nemild
The Best Time to Build in Crypto
@nemild
Crypto is in a bear market, but the underlying technology is becoming more useful than ever.
Stablecoins are spreading across financial institutions, tokenized assets are reshaping trading, fintech companies are quietly building on crypto rails, and AI agents may rely on them to transact. The hype may be down, but the opportunity to build is not.
Request for Startup: AI-Powered Consumer Products.
The web gave us Google and Airbnb. Mobile gave us Instagram and DoorDash. Three years into AI and almost nobody's home screen looks any different, apart from ChatGPT.
The reason is cost. Doing the genuinely impressive stuff can run a thousand dollars a month in tokens per user. But that figure is dropping tenfold a year.
Whoever starts building before the price arrives is the one who owns the category when it does. How people learn, travel, manage money, stay well, make friends. All of it back on the table.
From YC's Request for Startups, by @raphaelschaad
AI-Powered Consumer Products for a Billion People
@raphaelschaad
Every major platform shift creates new consumer giants. But three years into the AI era, ChatGPT is still the only new icon on most people’s home screens.
As intelligence gets better and dramatically cheaper, nearly every consumer category opens up again: education, health, finance, entertainment, transportation, and how we connect with each other. Consumer is going to be so back.
Request for Startup: Compute at Sea.
Every new data centre needs land, power and years of permitting, and it can still be killed off by local opposition after all that. Demand for compute isn't slowing down to wait for the paperwork.
So stop building on land. Put standardised, modular units out on the water, where nobody's objecting, the sun's already hitting, and the ocean handles the cooling for free. Run enough of them together and you've got a cloud that floats.
From YC's Request for Startups, by @FrancoisChauba1
Compute at Sea
@FrancoisChauba1
AI is running out of compute, and data centers are running out of electricity and land.
One possible solution is to move compute offshore. The ocean offers abundant space, sunlight, and natural cooling, opening the door to fleets of modular data centers operating together as a global cloud.
Request for Startup: Multiplayer AI.
Google Docs let two people type at once. Figma put the whole team on one canvas. The tools people reach for at work tend to be the ones they can pull a colleague into.
AI hasn't had that yet. An agent session is a room with one chair in it. You prompt, it works, and the only thing you can pass to a colleague is a transcript they can't touch.
So let people into the room. Anyone on the team drops into the same live session, watches it work, steers it off a bad path, picks it up when someone else logs off.
From YC's Request for Startups, by @aaron_epstein
Multiplayer AI
@aaron_epstein
The best work tools became more powerful when they became multiplayer. But AI is still mostly trapped in private chats, with agents working in sessions that teammates can’t join or influence.
The next generation of AI tools will let teams work with agents together in real time: watching, redirecting, and handing off work across engineering, sales, support, legal, finance, and more. AI’s multiplayer moment is coming.
Request for Startup: A Cloud for Small Software.
Agents have made it trivial to knock up a tool that solves exactly one problem for exactly one team. A tracker for your weird sprint process. A dashboard nobody else would ever want. Building it takes an afternoon. Getting it deployed, locked down and into a colleague's hands takes considerably longer.
AWS and Azure were built for products with a million users. Point them at a tool with three and you inherit all the complexity and none of the benefit.
Someone should build the cloud that assumes the audience is tiny. Sending a teammate a working app should feel like sending them a doc.
From YC's Request for Startups, by @koomen
A Cloud for Small Software
@koomen
Agents make it easy to build personal tools for yourself or your team. But deploying, securing, and sharing that software is still far more complicated than creating it.
A cloud built for small software could remove that complexity and make bespoke tools as easy to share with a colleague as a Google Doc.
Request for Startup: Modular Defense.
The US Army wants to buy from founders, not just primes. Sensors, drones, payloads and software that slot into an open architecture rather than locking them to one supplier for a decade. Logistics and manufacturing that hold up in the Arctic, in the jungle, underground.
Procurement runs on multi-year cycles. Threats move weekly. That gap is the whole opportunity.
They're offering capital and somewhere real to test it.
From YC's Request for Startups, by @SecArmy
The Future of American Defense
@SecArmy
Warfare is at an inflection point, and the Army is replacing the old playbook with commercially developed, modular technology that can be deployed and improved quickly.
We're looking for founders building low-cost interceptors, next-generation sensors, drones, resilient logistics, advanced manufacturing, and hardware that can survive the world’s harshest environments.