Popular startup incubator Y Combinator, led by Garry Tan, is caught up in a controversy. One of its featured startups, Optifye.ai, showed a video demo that many condemned as “dystopian." The backlash was so intense that YC quickly removed the video from its platform. The video, created by Optifye.ai founders Kushal Mohta and Vivaan Baid, depicted a factory management system driven by AI. It featured a colour-coded dashboard linked to cameras monitoring workers in real time.

In a particularly unsettling moment, Baid pointed out an employee slowing down production, identified only as ‘No. 17’ and chastised them through the system for underperformance.

Watch it here:

“Leave it to a bunch of children who’ve never worked a real job for a single day in their lives and still haven’t graduated college, to come up with some obnoxious slave-driving dystopian thing like this," wrote Christopher Amidon, founder of Subsea Robotics, on X. Another user questioned, “YC promoted a demo for slavery?"

Not everyone outright condemned the concept. Vedant Nair, a startup founder who previously participated in Y Combinator, took a more measured stance saying, “First, the YC sweatshop computer vision demo was in bad taste. Second, software like this already exists and is being used and factory managers want this."

As part of its routine, Y Combinator shares video demos from its startup cohorts but Optifye.ai’s demo has since been deleted from its X account. The company, according to its YC webpage, describes itself as an AI-driven performance monitoring system designed to help factory supervisors track worker activity in real-time reports to The San Francisco Standard.

“The shop floor has historically been a black box. With Optifye, manufacturing companies can now accurately measure worker output and make decisions that boost line efficiency by up to 30%," states the company’s description.

The inspiration for this system, the founders claim, comes from their backgrounds.

“Because our families run manufacturing companies, we’ve seen more assembly lines than most industrial engineers!" they reportedly wrote. Both Baid and Mohta started working on Optifye.ai in July last year, as per their LinkedIn profiles and are set to graduate from Duke University this May.

Baid, in his Y Combinator bio, shared that he has been “around assembly lines for as long as I can remember" and is now using his expertise in computer vision to tackle what he calls “a manufacturing company owner’s biggest problem: low labour productivity!"

Similarly, Mohta stated that his family owns “several manufacturing plants in various industries," giving him “unrestricted access to assembly lines" since he was 15.

The company is mentored by YC group partner Brad Flora, a seasoned entrepreneur and former journalist. According to his YC bio, Flora has worked with companies worth a collective $34 billion.

Despite the firestorm of criticism, neither Baid, Mohta, Flora nor any YC representatives have made an official comment.