DG Daiwa Ventures invests in three Y Combinator AI startups

Norbert Gehrke
Tokyo FinTech
Published in
2 min readJun 19, 2024

DG Daiwa Ventures has made investments in three AI startups that were selected for Y Combinator’s YC W24 Demo Day held in April this year. This brings the total number of DGDV’s investments in YC companies to 28.

Based in Silicon Valley, YC provides an accelerator program for early-stage startups. Since its establishment in 2005, it has produced companies such as Airbnb, Dropbox, and Stripe. With an acceptance rate of less than 2% of total applicants to Demo Day, it is a narrow gate. As an opportunity to meet promising startups at an early stage, DGDV attends every Demo Day by invitation.

The three companies that DGDV has invested in this time provide innovative solutions in their respective fields. Here are the details of the three companies.

Magic Hour

Magic Hour provides an AI video creation tool for creators on a subscription basis, and also supports marketing video creation, mainly for sports media.

Pump.co

Pump.co aims to be the Costco of cloud services, operating a group purchasing service for cloud services for startups. It leverages group purchasing and AI to automate cost reduction without requiring engineering effort.

Yoneda Labs

Yoneda Labs develops algorithms and software that use machine learning to quickly optimize parameters such as temperature, concentration, and catalysts suitable for compound synthesis.

Past DGDV investments in Y Combinator startups have been listed in a press release last year.

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Norbert Gehrke
Tokyo FinTech

Passionate about strategy & innovation across Asia. At home in Japan. Connector of people & ideas.