20-YO Stanford dropout raises $5 million for startup in just 2 days to study online behaviour using vision AI

20-year-old Stanford dropout Amogh Chaturvedi and his friends-cum-co-founders sold a startup at 19, landed in Y Combinator, and raised $5 million for their next company, California-based Human Behavior.

What’s more, the entrepreneurs in their early 20s have raised this amount in just two days from General Catalyst, Paul Graham, Vercel Ventures, and Y Combinator.

The LinkedIn post shared by Y Combinator states that, unlike traditional analytics tools such as Mixpanel or PostHog that depend on manually tagged events or clickstream data, Human Behavior uses computer vision to analyse user session replays at scale and generate insights automatically.

Also read: GST 2.0: Pan masala, gutka, cigarettes, to luxury cars, flavoured drinks will now fall under 40% 'sin' tax slab (startuppedia.in)

About the startup co-founders

Amogh Chaturvedi met co-founders Skyler Ji and Chirag Kawediya, both 22, at a hacker house he organised in 2023, to live and build with friends after his freshman year at Stanford.

Like Chaturvedi, Ji also dropped out of college (Berkeley), while Kawediya went on to graduate from the University of Chicago.

“I was rejected by YC 5 times applying with the same idea,” Skyler Ji shared on LinkedIn. “But then I met Chirag Kawediya and Amogh Chaturvedi, and things started moving faster instantly. We even had time to build out mini softwares for ourselves, our favorite being one that exported session replays out of Posthog and passed them through AI.”

Their first startup, Dough, was an e-commerce accounting tool they bootstrapped.

As reported by Tech Crunch, although YC was initially sceptical about Dough’s market potential, the team was admitted into the accelerator’s spring batch this year on the assumption they would eventually pivot.

They did so almost immediately, after speaking with every customer and inquiring about any other problems they faced.

How Human Behavior was founded?

While Dough could show which products were selling or not, the customers wanted to know why. Answering that required analytics powered by behavioral data, not just accounting reports.

With this new direction, the team sold Dough for six figures to Employer.com, the same company that bought Bench, and went for Human Behavior.

Kawediya shared with TC that companies using traditional analytics often need engineers to set up event trackers for every button and click, burning hours, sometimes weeks, of engineering time.

“Even once you have that data, you’re still stuck with the bigger question of how users actually interact with your product so you can make it better,” he said.

The four-month-old startup is already collaborating with rapidly growing Series A and B companies and sees session replays as an “untapped goldmine” that could eventually drive automated quality analytics and support solutions.

“We could’ve done the financial engineering game because we got more offers with higher valuations, but we didn’t want that,” Chaturvedi told TC.

Also read: Ashwini Vaishnaw launches India's first lithium-ion battery plant in Haryana with ₹3,000 crore investment (startuppedia.in)