Y Combinator Faces Backlash Over AI Startup's Controversial Worker Surveillance Demo

'Hey Number 17!'

Y Combinator supports an AI startup that's pitching granular machine vision surveillance of factory workers. A venture capital-backed "AI performance monitoring system for factory workers" is proposing what appears to be dehumanizing surveillance of factories, where machine vision tracks workers' hand movements and output so a boss can look at graphs and yell at them about efficiency. In a launch video demoing the product, founders Vivaan Baid and Kushal Mohta put on a skit showing how Optifye.ai would be used by factory bosses. "Ugh, it's workspace 17. Workspace 17 is the bottleneck. The worst performing workspace here," one of the bosses says, while watching a video of a man making clothing in a factory. "Hey number 17, what's going on man? You are in red," he says. "I have been working all day," the person playing the worker says. "Working all day?" the line boss replies. "You haven't hit your hourly output even once today. And you have 11.4% efficiency, this is really bad!" "It's just been a rough day," the "worker" replies. "Rough day?" the boss says, looking at a calendar full of red days. "More like a rough month." Optifye.ai, launched by Duke University computer science students Baid and Mohta, is backed by Y Combinator, according to the company's site. On their Y Combinator company profile, they write that both of their families run manufacturing plants, where they've been exposed to factory working conditions since they were children. "I've been around assembly lines for as long as I can remember," Baid wrote. Mohta wrote, "My family also runs several manufacturing plants in various industries, which has given me unrestricted access to assembly lines since I was 15." They hope to sell cameras to factory owners to use on assembly lines, their website says, and "use computer vision to tell supervisors who's working and who's not in real-time." Y Combinator deleted its recent Linkedin and X posts congratulating the company on launching. On their Y Combinator profile, Baid and Mohta outline who gets what out of installing micromanaging AI surveillance on assembly lines. Owners gets "accurate real-time factory, line, and worker productivity metrics," production heads get "line-wise and worker-wise metrics," shopfloor supervisors get to "identify who/what is causing inefficiency in the line and fix the problem on the go." For the workers? They get the tantalizing benefit of being "held accountable for good or bad performance." Worker surveillance is already happening across industries. After the rise of remote work, companies started tracking workers' productivity based on mouse movements, so workers started using "mouse jigglers" so they could walk away from their computers and use the bathroom in peace. In Amazon warehouses, workers are tracked and punished for not meeting grueling expectations and bathroom breaks are timed, resulting in more injuries and less safe working conditions. Optifye.ai's approach and pitch, however, stands out because of the way its founders seem to embrace cruelty to workers in the name of productivity. Optifye.ai and Y Combinator did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Y Combinator Supports AI Startup Dehumanizing Factory Workers

Optifye.ai's pitch includes a video where a "boss" yells at a "worker" by calling him a number, and sarcastically saying he's having a bad month. A venture capital-backed "AI performance monitoring system for factory workers" is proposing what appears to be dehumanizing surveillance of factories, where machine vision tracks workers' hand movements and output so a boss can look at graphs and yell at them about efficiency. In a launch video demoing the product, Baid and Mohta put on a skit showing how Optifye.ai would be used by factory bosses. "Ugh, it's workspace 17. Workspace 17 is the bottleneck. The worst performing workspace here," one of the bosses says, while watching a video of a man making clothing in a factory. "Hey number 17, what's going on man? You are in red," he says. "I have been working all day," the person playing the worker says. "Working all day?" the line boss replies. "You haven't hit your hourly output even once today. And you have 11.4% efficiency, this is really bad!" "It's just been a rough day," the "worker" replies. "Rough day?" the boss says, looking at a calendar full of red days. "More like a rough month." Optifye.ai, launched by Duke University computer science students Vivaan Baid and Kushal Mohta, is backed by Y Combinator, according to the company's site. On their Y Combinator company profile, they write that both of their families run manufacturing plants, where they've been exposed to factory working conditions since they were children. "I've been around assembly lines for as long as I can remember," Baid wrote. Mohta wrote, "My family also runs several manufacturing plants in various industries, which has given me unrestricted access to assembly lines since I was 15." They hope to sell cameras to factory owners to use on assembly lines, their website says, and "use computer vision to tell supervisors who's working and who's not in real-time." Y Combinator deleted its recent Linkedin and X posts congratulating the company on launching. On their Y Combinator profile, Baid and Mohta outline who gets what out of installing micromanaging AI surveillance on assembly lines. Owners gets "accurate real-time factory, line, and worker productivity metrics," production heads get "line-wise and worker-wise metrics," shopfloor supervisors get to "identify who/what is causing inefficiency in the line and fix the problem on the go." For the workers? They get the tantalizing benefit of being "held accountable for good or bad performance." Worker surveillance is already happening across industries. After the rise of remote work, companies started tracking workers' productivity based on mouse movements, so workers started using "mouse jigglers" so they could walk away from their computers and use the bathroom in peace. In Amazon warehouses, workers are tracked and punished for not meeting grueling expectations and bathroom breaks are timed, resulting in more injuries and less safe working conditions. Optifye.ai's approach and pitch, however, stands out because of the way its founders seem to embrace cruelty to workers in the name of productivity. Optifye.ai and Y Combinator did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Watch This Startup Pitch Dystopian Sweatshop-Monitoring Software

Startup accelerator Y Combinator pulled the demo video following intense backlash on X. Following intense backlash, startup accelerator Y Combinator quietly pulled a video from its X account demonstrating a new startup's AI-powered worker monitoring software. The startup, called Optifye, says on its website that it is developing "AI line optimization for manual assembly" that can boost efficiency by up to 30%. That sounds anodyne enough until you watch the video. "Thirty percent line efficiency? That's bad," the video starts, as a young man looks at a dashboard showing the supposed performance metrics of a specific worker on a manufacturing line. The man calls his "supervisor," who looks at a dashboard filled with red and begins haranguing the worker, whom he refers not by name but only as "Workspace 17," over a video feed pointing down at the worker's station. The worker pleads that he has been working all day, only for the manager to look at another dashboard and retort, "you haven't even hit your hourly output once today, and you had 11.4% efficiency." How that efficiency number is calculated, or what that would even mean to a line worker, is unclear. "It's just been a rough day," the worker adds, only for the manager to say, "Rough day? More like a rough month." Y Combinator is considered the premier boot camp for new startups to get off the ground and provides accepted companies with $500,000 in initial funding. There are many things you could say about this video. It, of course, comes off as cold and inhumane. But what is perhaps most funny is that, despite claiming it can increase assembly line efficiency, in the demo video itself, Optifye's software has zero impact other than to harass the worker. The so-called managers do not take any tangible steps to resolve the "issue" other than yelling at the man. How exactly the software can improve efficiency other than encouraging managers to berate their reports is unclear. Optifye's website leans on the idea that only what is measured can be improved. Maybe the video garnered such a visceral reaction from people across Silicon Valley due to an underlying PTSD from the way in which software engineers are already monitored through tracking software like Jira. But the few defenders out there have pointed out that the founders of Optifye appear to be from India, and dubiously argue that work ethic in the country is much less reliable than one can expect in the United States. Optifye is likely targeting the Indian manufacturing base, where different, and more, accountability tools may be necessary. However, the poor productivity may be due in part to a bad managerial class in the country, where a 2022 report found 45% of workers dreaded going to work due to poor treatment by a supervisor. And needless to say, video monitoring is not an accepted practice in most of the world and is never received well when it is identified. Another argument that has been made defending the video is that critics are hypocritical to complain about "sweatshop" practices while using devices, like iPhones, made using cheap foreign labor. But it is tough to avoid these products today due to the complex global supply chain and the glacial pace at which change can be made. One can still denounce these types of surveillance practices, not endorse or support them, without being a hypocrite. No matter where you come down on the subject, especially considering the cultural nuance, the video was quite tone-deaf considering it was published on the X account of a U.S.-based investment firm. How nobody at the company recognized what type of feedback the video would receive is damning.

Y Combinator Pulls Support for AI Startup After Video Emerges of Boss Barking at Human Worker, Calling Him "Number 17"

Scientific Management, sometimes called "Taylorism" after its founder, Frederick W. Taylor, is the idea that human workers can be fine-tuned to be more efficient. If a garment factory worker could make a shirt two seconds quicker by standing instead of sitting, then a Taylorist boss would have them stand, because those two seconds per shirt add up over time. That was back in the 1880s, but lately Taylorism hasn't just been surviving -- it's thriving, as wireless gadgets and management software allow bosses to monitor workers in ways Taylor could only dream of. For examples, look at Amazon's tracking wristbands for its warehouse workers, UPS fitting its trucks with cameras -- but not air conditioning -- and monitoring software that follows remote workers at home. Add to that list a startup called Optifye, a Y Combinator-backed venture that's "building AI performance monitoring for factory workers, boosting line efficiency for manufacturing companies." The company is founded by two undergrads from Duke university who brag that their families "run manufacturing companies." The surveillance platform caused a firestorm on the internet this week after a demo video surfaced showing a supervisor use the software to hone in on a worker who he referred to as "Number 17" instead of a human name, berating him for poor performance on the factory line. According to the demo, Optifye represents each worker with a numbered rectangle, colored green if performance is up and red if performance is down. "Hey Number 17, what's going on man?" Optifye's co-founder Kushal Mohta asks his theoretical sweatshop pawn. "You're in the red... You haven't hit your hourly output even once and you had 11.4 percent efficiency. This is really bad." The worker responds that he's just been having a rough day. Mohta zooms out onto number 17's day-by-day profile, showing a calendar of red squares. "Rough day? More like a rough month," he retorts. The video was panned across the web, including on Y Combinator's own Hacker News blog. "Basically modern slavery," wrote one user there. "They were missing a whip robot there as well, and maybe a drum playing robot." "I want to see the rest of the story where the boss fires him and is visited by three ghosts," one user posted on X-formerly-Twitter. The backlash was so fierce that Y Combinator -- a startup incubator that's backed ventures like Reddit, Doordash and Instacart -- pulled its announcement and demo video down, and deleted some Optifye videos on social media. Y Combinator still lists the panopticon-as-service startup as active on its website, though, where it refers to the factory floor -- a place where workers trade huge chunks of their lives to earn a living -- as a "black box," meaning a system producing products for unknown reasons. It's a dehumanizing sales pitch, to say the least. Unfortunately for workers around the world, public backlash only goes so far when profits are on the line. "Software like this already exists, is being used, and factory managers want this," wrote Vedant Nair, a founder whose robotics startup was backed by Y Combinator. He's not far off. Indeed, corporations like Walmart, Delta, Starbucks, and Chevron are already partnering with AI monitoring companies like Aware to surveil workers for thought crimes like talking about unions, wages, and working conditions. In the early 1900s, Frederick Taylor and his boys weren't afraid to brag that scientific management would bring about the "degradation of workmen into obedient oxen under the direction of a small body of experts -- into men debarred from creative participation in their work." (see page 461 of Scientific Management in American Industry, basically the Taylorist manifesto). In 2025, their spirit lives on -- now embodied by 20 year old startup bros backed by millionaire venture capitalists. Oh, how the times change.

Y Combinator deletes posts after a startup's demo goes viral | TechCrunch

A demo from Optifye.AI, a member of Y Combinator's current cohort, sparked a social media backlash that ended up with YC deleting it off its socials. Optifye, which is part of YC's 2025 winter batch, says it's building software to help factory owners know who's working -- and who isn't -- in "real-time" thanks to AI-powered security cameras it places on assembly lines, according to its YC profile. On Monday, YC posted an Optifye demo video on X (and on LinkedIn), according to a snapshot saved by TechCrunch. The video shows Optifye co-founder Kushal Mohta acting as the boss of a garment factory, calling a supervisor -- in reality his co-founder Vivaan Baid -- about a low-performing worker known only as "Number 17." "Hey Number 17, what's going on man? You're in the red," Baid asks the worker, who responds that he's been working all day. "Working all day? You haven't hit your hourly output even once and you had 11.4% efficiency. This is really bad," Baid retorts. After checking Optifye's dashboard, the supervisor looks at the output of "Number 17" for 15 days, decides that the worker has been underperforming and calls the worker out on it. Not everyone was critical, though. Eoghan McCabe, the CEO of customer support startup Intercom, posted that anyone complaining better stop buying products made in China and India. Indeed, it's not too difficult to find tech companies in China touting a 'sleep detection' camera that uses computer vision to spot sleeping workers, for example. Either way, YC ended up deleting the demo video from its socials, but not before it was saved by several accounts. Neither YC nor Optifye.AI responded to a request for comment. The video's likely unintended virality showcases growing anxieties over the rise of AI, especially in the workplace. Most Americans oppose using AI to track workers' desk time, movements, and computer use, a Pew poll found in 2023. This is a segment of surveillance products sometimes called "bossware." That hasn't stopped VCs from funding the space, though. Invisible AI, for example, raised $15 million in 2022 to stick worker-monitoring cameras in factories, too.